Company Name: Alby
Founder: Michael Bouman, Moritz Kaminski, Renée Aaron
Established date: Open source project founded in December 2020 / company founded in March 2022
Headquarters: Fully remote
Amount of Bitcoin held by the Treasury: N/A
Number of employees: Ten
Website: https://getalby.com/
Public or private? private
Michael Bumann wants to make it easier for people to send value over the internet.
This is why he made Alby — a company born out of open source efforts, best known for its browser extension wallet app that allows users to send and receive money. soil Via the Lightning Network.
Bumann, a quiet, introspective German web developer with decades of experience in the field, believes bitcoin should be able to move freely like information on the internet, and to make this happen, he wants to see lightning integrated into every corner of the web.
“Our mission is to make Lightning available within web applications,” Bumann told Bitcoin Magazine. “We want to make this accessible and make it a truly deep integration, a very seamless experience where payments don’t interfere with the user experience.”
Bumann and the team at Alby are now on the verge of achieving that mission: Alby is one of the easiest Lightning wallets to set up and use, and has become a go-to for creators around the world.
But what many don’t know about Alby is that it’s much more than just a Lightning wallet.
What is Alby?
“Alby was initially a browser extension[wallet],” Bumann said of the Alby wallet, which allows users to create convenient LNURL addresses (e.g. yourname@getalby.com) that can be used to send and receive bitcoin via Lightning.
“The goal was for the browser to be able to communicate with the Alby extension, which in turn could communicate with nodes on the Lightning Network. Landland “[Implementing a Lightning node]and communicating with LND from a browser was, and still is, very complicated indeed,” he added.
After a while, Buman and Alby’s team Wallet APIcan be used to integrate Lightning Payments into any application. Consider integrating Lightning Payments into your favorite podcast app and getting paid as a podcaster.
Alby also offers users LNDHub, which allows them to plug in and manage multiple Lightning accounts through one interface and node.
While many people use the Alby browser extension wallet as a custodial wallet, users can also use it in a non-custodial manner. AlbihubThis allows users to connect to Alby via their own nodes or pay a small fee to have Alby run a node for them.
“Ideally, we want to move in a direction where it’s easy for people to run their own node and their own wallet,” Buman said. “Anything in between is an intermediate step.”
Alby has something for everyone, from beginner to advanced, which is one of the reasons it has gained so much attention in just two and a half years.
In that respect, Albie has grown faster than Buman and his team expected. Set your Alby account to invitation only For now, it’s all about keeping up with demand, which is only set to increase as Buman and his team implement Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC).
Nostl Wallet Connect (NWC)
Bumann acknowledged that Lightning is “still very small” and believes it is still in the “research phase” regarding Layer 2 and its use cases, but: Nostrzap A great way to use Lightning.
But beyond Zaps, Bumann and Alby’s team have found other ways Nostr can further drive Lightning adoption.
They are, Nostre Relay To submit a Lightning invoice payment request, they Nostl Wallet Connect (NWC) Working with your team amethysta client of Nostr.
Over the past few months, Alby has been preparing to release a new wallet that will take advantage of new and unique features offered by NWC.
“We are currently in the process of releasing a new self-sovereign Lightning wallet focused on the NWC,” Buman said.
“This is a new wallet that is focused on NWC as the protocol for interacting with the wallet. It’s not like your typical wallet where you have a send button, a receive button and a list of transactions,” he added.
“[With this new wallet]users only have to set up the channel, liquidity and keys once, and then they can give specific permissions to certain applications to allow them to do things like, ‘OK, you can receive money in my name. You can send a certain amount of money in my name. I have a subscription service that allows me to withdraw $10 from the wallet every month.’”
Buman went on to say that non-custodial Lightning wallets that accept and distribute payments in this way wouldn’t be possible without the NWC. He added that the protocol isn’t necessarily optimized for human use. Rather, it’s primarily designed to be able to connect to other applications, which he believes “will enable even more applications.”
“It’s an always-on optimized wallet. One of the limitations of Lightning is that you need to be online to send and receive (sats),” Buman said.
“Especially if you want to automate it in other applications, the wallet has to be available, so that’s why we said, ‘optimize for that.’ Users don’t have to interact with the application. They just do it once and that’s it,” he added.
This type of wallet can be run from your desktop, server, or the cloud provided by Alby. With the cloud option, user data and keys are encrypted with just a password.
What’s next for Albie?
While Bumann and the Alby team make post-rollout fine-tuning changes to the NWC, including the release of an NWC mobile app, they also plan to consider further ways to evolve Alby into the future.
Buman said Alby doesn’t have plans to release its own mobile app yet, as a mobile UI doesn’t lend itself to the integrated UX that Alby offers through its browser extension product.
He said that implementing Bolt 12 is “definitely on the list,” but it doesn’t seem to be a top priority.
He also has his eye on the burgeoning electronic cash system. Kash and Feddy And then we looked at how we could incorporate those things into Alby.
But above all else, he and Alby’s team pay close attention to the feedback they get from users to improve their product. To get this feedback, Alby makes customer service a top priority.
“We’re still in the early stages, so we need that,” Bumann said. “There are still rough edges, and even people who are excited about bitcoin are still running into problems.”
Bumann and the Alby team are working to mitigate these issues in two ways:
“Firstly, we’re trying to make it easier for users to get around some of these difficult issues and somehow get on board the Bitcoin and Lightning wave,” he said.
“Secondly, it’s really important for us to identify where people are struggling. It’s a great feedback channel. We also see this as kind of a collaboration with our users,” he explained.
And when Buhman says “we,” he means it: Despite being a co-founder of Alby, a project that has grown exponentially in almost no time, he remains humble and in touch with the people he serves.
“It’s really important that the developers who are working on the code and building the features get feedback from users or are close to user feedback,” Buman said, “and that’s why all of us[in customer service]especially in the beginning, still do that.”
