Stacker News adds Self-custodial Spending with NWC
It was in summer 2022, when Keyan, the founder of Stacker News and the Alby team talked about challenges of operating bitcoin apps and what we can do to help developers build more and better apps. That was the moment when Keyan mentioned that he would love to allow his users to send and receive bitcoin on Stacker News directly out of their own wallets. Back then users had to deposit funds first to tip other authors or withdraw them to their own wallet for two reasons: First, there was no easy and standardized way for wallet-app connections across platforms and second, lightning specific challenges with nodes behind tor or liquidity requirements would deteriorate the user experience too much.
Fast forward one and a half years Stacker News enabled self-custodial spending for their users leveraging NWC, an open standard to connect wallets to apps.
Stacker News - the place to experience bitcoin
Stacker News is like Hacker News, but… supercharged with exciting features, including paying users in bitcoin. It started off as an innovative news platform that focuses exclusively on Bitcoin-related news, analysis, and insights. Today, you’ll find discussions about a variety of topics there created by a highly engaged user base with minimal noise. Using bitcoin payments is optional but provides additional incentives to deliver quality content by rewarding popular publications. Every comment counts and can receive rewards from appreciative users. Readers can upvote posts and comments with sats as a high value signal compared to mere “likes” or “thumb up” on other social media platforms. On Stacker News, users had to deposit sats to their account before sending payments to publishers and could later withdraw them back to their own wallet. This process unified the user experience but required Stacker News to hold funds from users. It was a necessary step… until recently.
NWC - Let your app talk to any wallet
NWC helps Stacker News to overcome the challenges of self-custodial spending and receiving (soon) by allowing users to connect their own wallet. It is an open protocol for direct connectivity between wallets and applications for in-app payments. This eliminates the need to switch contexts when confirming payments within the original wallet and thus mirrors the familiar in-app payment experience while utilizing each user's preferred wallet. The choice of wallet is entirely in the hands of the user. No more deposits or withdrawals - a NWC powered app can use sats directly from your wallet.
Furthermore, NWC enables self-custodial and custodial wallets, web, desktop or mobile wallets alike, independent of the operating system. Alby, Mutiny, Umbrel or StartOS are among the first who are increasing transaction activity by letting their users do more with their wallet.
Attach your wallet via NWC
To attach your preferred wallet navigate to the wallet view on Stacker News.
Click ‘attach wallets’ and choose NWC.
Set a budget, create a NWC connection string in your wallet and paste it into the field. Umbrel and StartOS offer NWC in their app stores and Mutiny in their dashboard. The connection string of your Alby Account is available at https://nwc.getalby.com/.
That’s it. You successfully linked your wallet to Stacker News and are ready to zap directly out of your own account.
One thing less to worry for App Developers
Stacker News' goal is to “allow stackers to send money directly to one another for their contributions, using these attached wallets, without needing to trust SN”. Now, one and a half years after our initial discussion, this idea is about to become reality. NWC is playing an important role in simplifying the lives of developers integrating bitcoin payments.
App developers are able to focus on crafting exceptional experiences, while users just enjoy these applications. Payments, essential as they are, should simply function smoothly. NWC as an open protocol helps wallets and apps to achieve that.
If you are an app or wallet developer join the Discord channel to learn more or contact us directly. We're excited to assist you in leveraging open payments for everybody.