Several projects to make merchant adoption easier and cheaper

One significant advancement is the Electrum CLINK plugin, designed to facilitate receiving unsolicited Lightning payments without requiring merchants to expose their wallets to the internet or manually generate invoices for every transaction. By routing payment requests through nostr relays, this solution allows merchants to accept payments directly into their Electrum wallets, offering greater privacy and convenience. More information about this can be found at Electrum CLINK on GitHub.

Inbound liquidity remains a critical challenge in the Lightning ecosystem, often forcing users to rely on centralized liquidity providers. The Electrum liquidity manager plugin automates the process of obtaining inbound liquidity via Electrum’s decentralized submarine swap mechanism. It systematically cycles through available swap providers until one completes successfully, thereby sparing users from the laborious and unreliable process of manual attempts. This approach significantly improves reliability and accessibility for everyday merchants. Details are available at Electrum Liquidity Manager on GitHub.

Managing swaps in Electrum traditionally requires command-line expertise, which deters many potential users. The Electrum Swap GUI addresses this by providing a graphical interface for Electrum’s built-in swap server, making it accessible to those without command-line experience. This functionality enables users to offer swaps to others and potentially earn yield on their Bitcoin holdings, broadening participation in decentralized finance activities using Electrum. Access the tool at Electrum Swap GUI on GitHub.

Bringing these innovations together, the BareBits merchant software offers a comprehensive self-custody payment solution that rivals BTCPay Server but eliminates the need for expensive VPS hosting. Designed to run on standard web hosting or even as a simple Windows desktop installation, BareBits integrates with Electrum wallets via CLINK, NWC, or LNURL, enabling direct receipt of Lightning payments. Its compatibility with BTCPay ensures seamless integration with widely used ecommerce platforms such as WooCommerce and Magento, simply by changing the endpoint URL. While the software incurs a 1% fee, it remains fully open-source, private, and self-hosted. Merchants seeking hassle-free liquidity management can also leverage cashu mints, which automatically sweep balances to the merchant’s wallet or swap them on-chain when economically justified. Full project details are provided at BareBits Cashu Payserver on GitHub.

In operational scenarios, if a merchant’s Electrum wallet is offline during a Lightning payment attempt via CLINK, the system gracefully falls back to alternative payment methods. On-chain options are always visible at checkout if enabled, while Lightning transactions sequentially try CLINK, NWC, LNURL, and Strike, with customizable order. Cashu mints are considered last, serving as reliable backups due to their inherent inbound liquidity. Their balances are swept to the merchant’s main Lightning wallet or converted on-chain as needed, ensuring funds’ availability and continuity of service even if the primary wallet is inaccessible.

Collectively, these projects represent substantial progress toward lowering barriers for merchant onboarding to Lightning, reducing reliance on custodians, and improving both the resilience and usability of decentralized Bitcoin payment infrastructure.