Alby announced a new partnership with RSS.com. A podcasting platform that manages the hosting, distribution, analytics, and monetization of podcasts. RSS.com becomes the first podcast hosting company in the world to enable Value 4 Value payments.

Alby! Its been buzzing around SN and BT for what seems like a couple months now. But it wasn't until the news this week that it got our attention. Alby is helping bring RSS.com (the podcast distribution company/not the protocol) into the world of Value 4 Value by enabling Bitcoin payment streaming via the Lightning Network. The integration is relatively simple it allows RSS.com podcasters to receive Bitcoin payments, create a Bitcoin Lightning wallet through Alby, and view their balance directly from their dashboards.

😏 Lets get the obvious out of the way

• 🧤 Yes its custodial for RSS.com users
• 🧚 NOT many RSS.com users to onboard to ⚡️

None of this matters. This is just the first one to fall in a series of podcast distributors that should enable podcasting 2.0 The more interesting tell is the fact that RSS.com is a company known for always chasing the "next" thing. Which is good sign if your building on the Lightning network.

🐝 So...is Alby taking off?

It seems, traction has been slow but the amount of work on the Github is continuing and they have already started to unleash the bounties.

"Write Once Run on Any Browser," at least that is the proposed idea behind Web Extension starteravailable to any dev looking to create. WebLN is currently being used by a handful of projects in the space, Stacker.News, Bitrefill, LNMarkets, kwh to name a few. WebLN provides a programmatic, permissioned interface for letting applications ask users to send payments, generate invoices to receive payments, and much more.

You may be interested in using WebLN if you...

• Have an application that accepts or makes Lightning payments to users
• Want to have decentralized identity and authentication in your application
• Are working on a Lightning node wallet, and want to make it easier for your users to interact with Lightning web apps

⚡️Why is Alby a different ⚡️ experience for the browser?

Alby is an extension that provides good enough ⚡️ integration for websites (for payments and authentication flows.) It gets the job done where other extensions couldn't and also gets rid of any complication in an already complicated ⚡️ world.

The goal is to write a minimal web extension to allow browsers to interact with the Lightning Network programmatically. It focuses on the web-payments process and does not try to be a full node UI with advanced channel-management or similar features.

When signing up with Alby for the first time. Alby asks if you would like to connect to a different node implementation. It supports both custodial and non-custodial setups.

Kinda 🔥🔥🔥

👀 ⚡️Features

• Custom budgets/allowances for websites to allow payment streams/auto-payments
• Multiple accounts and support for different node backends (lnd, etc.)
• Full WebLN send and receive payment flows (getInfo, sendPayment, fixed makeInvoice support)
• LNURL-pay support
• LNURL-auth support
• Payment history with additional website metadata
• LNURL-withdraw support
• WebLN signMessage, verifyMessage support
• WebLN dynamic makeInvoice support
• Keysend
• Lsat support

Alby has Bounties 🛠 💰

Alby is offering bounties for the challenges listed below. They have bounties for coding and non-coding related topics.

If you want to:

• start working on a bounty
• ask about the status of a bounty
• propose a new bounty
• or if you need help

reach out to [email protected] or join our Community Slack Channel