Last Week in Bitcoin (June 23 - 29)
Highlights from the bitcoin developer ecosystem
Please extend a very big welcome to Tuma Bitcoiner to btc++ insider edition as our first open source reporter. This week, Tuma brings you highlights from across the bitcoin open source ecosystem. Here’s what caught his interest this week.
wave.space is pioneering a self-custodial powered Visa debit card. Live on your bitcoin stack, hold it in self-custody, and spend it easily at any merchant that accepts debit cards.
Showcased at the Alby Community Call this past Thursday, June 27th by Eivydas Račkauskas, co-founder of wave.space
Eivydas, Felix, and Mantas of the wave.space team are closing the gap on bitcoin adoption at merchants for people that want to live on a Bitcoin Standard
What’s cool about the tech: using the Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) to bridge self-custody bitcoin to traditional payment rails (VISA network)
Alby Freepilot wants you to pay AI agents to solve Github issues on your favorite open source projects. No more waiting for the devs to do something, directly pay an AI to solve issues for you.
Showcased at the Alby Community call this past Thursday, June 27th by Roland Bewick of the Alby core team.
Leverages NWC to bridge the gap between payments and AI agents without the risk of overcharging you for work done.
What’s cool about the tech: copying and pasting a link is enough to get a complete solution even on non-trivial issues.
BTCNutServer is an experimental plugin that adds cashu e-cash capabilities to the existing BTCPayServer stack. Accept payments from trusted and untrusted mints for your goods and services on your existing BTCPayServer instance.
Showcased at the monthly Cashu Dev Call on June 26th.
Available as an experimental plugin — use at your own risk!
What’s cool about the tech: Will auto-convert sats from untrusted mints to onchain or LN payments.
Lots is happening in cashu, find out more in their devcall agenda writeup
core-lightning developer Rusty Russell is committed to making recurring payments for BOLT12 a reality after hearing activist stories at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Oslo this past May.
On the core-lightning call last week, Rusty Russell talked about how activists in authoritarian countries rely on donations to continue their fights for freedom. What is missing today, is a way to simply receive money.
What’s cool about the tech: BOLT12 is the latest protocol for payments on lightning; adding recurring payments would unlock the ability to pay activists repeatedly more privately.
Recurring payments, or subscriptions, were originally a part of the BOLT12 design but was pushed off to make original implementation of the protocol move faster. Rusty’s refocused on this now.
You can follow his progress on the BOLT PR to re-add it.
MCP-Money brings the Skynet one step closer by giving agents their own wallets to pay for services of other agents using Cashu notes.
Project by long-time nostr dev Pablo Fernandez.
NIP-60 is a nostr spec which defines how to use Cashu wallets over Nostr.
What’s cool about the tech: Any AI agent can have a NIP-60 compatible wallet. This unlocks the ability for an agent to pay for other agents + services or receive payments via e-cash.
Hopefully your AI agents do a better job at business than Anthropic’s AI vendor, Claudius.
Looking for an opportunity to join up with some bitcoin devs in person? Join us in Riga this August 7+8 to talk about privacy in bitcoin.
Big thanks to NYDIG and HRF's Bitcoin Developer Fund, our Satoshi level sponsors for btc++ events this year.