Company Name: Alby
Founders: Michael Bowman, Moritz Kaminsky, and Rene Aron
Date of Establishment: Open source project founded in December 2020 / Company founded in March 2022
Headquarter Location: Fully remote control
Amount of Bitcoin in the vault: Unavailable
Number of Employees: 10
website: https://getalby.com/
Public or private? private
Michael Bowman wants to make it easier for people to send value online.
That’s why he created Alby — A company turned open source initiative, it is known for its browser extension wallet app, which allows users to send and receive satellites over the Lightning Network.
Baumann, a soft-spoken German web developer with decades of experience in his field, believes that Bitcoin should be able to move as freely as information on the internet. To that end, he would like to see Lightning technology embedded throughout the web.
“The mission is to make Lightning available within web applications,” Bowman told Bitcoin Magazine. “We want to make that available — to have this real deep integration, something that’s so seamless that payments no longer get in the way of user experiences.”
Bowman and his team at Alby are currently succeeding in their mission, as Alby is one of the easiest Lightning wallets to set up and use and has become a favorite destination for creators around the world.
But what many people don’t know about Alby is that it’s more than just a Lightning wallet.
What is Albi?
“Alby was initially a browser extension (wallet),” Bowman said of the Alby wallet, which allows users to create a convenient LNURL address (e.g., yourname@getalby.com) that they can use to send and receive bitcoin via Lightning.
“The goal was to have the browser talk to the Alby extension, which then talks to a node on the Lightning Network. At the time, we basically had lind “(Implementing a Lightning Node) and talking to LND from a browser was and still is actually quite complex,” he added.
After some time, Bowman and his team at Albi succeeded in creating API Walletwhich can be used to integrate Lightning Payments into any app. Consider integrating Lightning Payments into your favorite podcast app to help you get paid for your work as a podcast producer.
Alby also provides its users with LNDHub, which allows them to connect and manage multiple Lightning accounts via a single interface and node.
Many people use the Alby browser extension wallet as a custodial wallet, but users can also use it in a non-custodial way with Albi Centerallowing users to connect to Alby via their own node or pay a small fee to have Alby run a node for them.
“Ideally, we move in a direction where it’s easy for people to manage their own nodes and their own wallets. Anything in between is an intermediate step,” Bowman said.
Alby has something for everyone, from new users to more advanced users, which is one of the reasons it has gained so much traction in just two and a half years.
In this way, Albi grew faster than Bowman and his team expected, prompting them to make the decision Set up an invite-only Alby account For now, they can keep up with demand — demand that is only expected to grow as Bowman and his team implement Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC).
Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC)
While Bowman admits that Lightning is “still very young” and believes we’re still in a “research phase” regarding Layer 2 and its use cases, he sees Nostra Zaps As a great use of Lightning.
But beyond Zaps, Bowman and his team at Alby found another way Nostr could help boost Lightning adoption.
They saw that they could use Noster relays To send requests to pay Lightning bills. That’s why they created a protocol called Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) in collaboration with the team from amethystNostr client.
Over the past few months, Alby has been preparing to launch its new wallet, which will take advantage of the new and unique capabilities offered by NWC.
“We are currently on the cusp of launching our new self-sovereign Lightning wallet focused on NWC,” Bowman said.
“It’s a new wallet that focuses on NWC as a protocol for interacting with the wallet. It’s different from a typical wallet that has a send button, a receive button, and a transaction list,” he added.
“[With this new wallet, users will only need to]set up channels and liquidity and their keys once. Then they can give certain permissions to certain apps and let them say, ‘Okay, you can receive money in my name. You can send a certain amount of money in my name. Here’s a subscription service that I’m allowing to withdraw $10 from my wallet every month’ — things like that.”
Bowman went on to say that a non-custodial Lightning wallet that accepts and distributes payments in this way would be impossible without NWC. He added that the protocol is not necessarily optimized for human use. Instead, it is primarily designed to connect to other applications, and he believes that this “will make many other applications possible.”
“It’s a wallet that’s optimized to be always available, because one of the limitations we have with Lightning is that you have to be online to receive and send (satellites),” Bowman said.
“If you want to automate things in other apps, the wallet has to be there. That’s why we said, ‘Enhance this.’ The user doesn’t need to interact with the app. You can launch it once and that’s it,” he added.
This type of wallet can be run from a desktop, a server, or a cloud provided by Alby. With the cloud option, users’ data and keys will be encrypted using only a password.
What’s next for Alby?
While Bowman and the Alby team will be fine-tuning the NWC for its launch — which will include the release of the NWC mobile app — they will also be looking at other ways to take Alby into the future.
Bowman noted that Alby still has no plans to release its own mobile app, as the mobile UI is not a good fit for the integrated user experience that Alby offers via its browser extension product.
Implementing Bolt 12 is “definitely on the list,” he says, though it doesn’t appear to be his top priority.
He is also interested in emerging e-money systems such as Cashu and And covers And consider how he might be able to integrate it into Alby.
But most importantly, the Alby team cares about user feedback in an effort to improve their products. And to get that feedback, Alby puts customer service first.
“Customer service is also essential because everything we do is really early,” Bowman said. “It has rough edges, and even enthusiastic bitcoiners still have issues.”
Bowman and the Albi team are working to mitigate these problems in two ways:
“First, we’re trying to make it easier for users to get past those rough edges and somehow get on the Bitcoin and Lightning train,” he said.
“Secondly, it’s very important for us to identify areas where people are struggling. It’s a great channel for feedback. We also see it as a kind of collaboration with users,” he explained.
And when Bowman says “we,” he really means it. Despite being one of the founders of Alby, a project that has grown so rapidly in such a short time, he has remained humble and connected to those he serves.
“It’s very important that developers who are working on code and building features get user feedback or are close to user feedback,” Bowman said. “That’s why, especially in the beginning, (I do customer service) and we all still do.”