Helping merchants take Bitcoin Lightning Payments

Hi, you're listening to the Stephan Livera podcast focused on Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today my guests are Rui Gomes and João Almeida of OpenNode, a new Bitcoin Lightning payment processing company. They're doing some really interesting things and they're a Bitcoin-only company. So here's my chat with the guys. Rui and João, welcome to the Hey, how we doing? Glad to be here. Big,

I'm a big fan of the, this podcast, so it's a pleasure to be participating.

Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I, I really like the stuff you guys are doing with OpenNode, so obviously I had to get you guys on, and we can talk a little bit about you and talk a little bit about what OpenNode is doing. So Rui and João, do you guys wanna just tell us a little bit about your background?

Okay, yeah. So, I'm a software engineer.

I've been, Created OpenNode, I've been doing freelancing mostly for the last past three years. I have a master's in, co-informatics and computer engineering, and I come from Portugal So yeah,

my name is Rui, I also have a masters in software engineering. I've been working for the past five years or so in, mostly startups. worked in a startup that exited to WeWork, worked at a startup in the ad tech space that went from no users when I joined to thousands of requests per second, we had crazy adventures trying to scale up to meet demand. I bought my first Bitcoin like in 2016, but it wasn't until, Last year in like May, when Joao invited me to join this, idea they had that eventually turned out to be OpenNode, that I really start diving into the Bitcoin rabbit hole and, yeah, here,

here we are today. Fantastic. Yeah, look, let's get into it then. So let's talk about, tell us the background of OpenNode as a company.

So yeah, as I was saying before, I co-founded OpenNode with Afnan and Brandon, which are the two other co-founders. So two years ago, Afnan and Brandon They were running a design studio focused on Bitcoin products. So their main focus was to bridge, the gap between Bitcoin and basically the rest of the world. So at that time, they heard about Lightning Network from Jack Maillers, as you're probably familiar with, founder of Zap. So at that, afternoon, and Brandon basically asked, Jack if they, he needed help with the design. they, they saw like the al, the Lightning Network as like the scaling solution for Bitcoin, and they knew that the second layer was the The bridge they needed to help build, to help, build for Bitcoin to be adopted by the rest of the world. So at that time, coincidentally, I was in New York, I was doing an internship actually, and I, I heard about Bitcoin at that time. It was like two years ago. So as a software engineer, what's the best way to start dig-in, dig-in into something is actually like seek for open source projects, start to contribute. So yeah, Avner and Brandon were the second and third contributors to Zap, and I was the fourth. so after Zap getting featured on Bloomberg when, Stark was talking about Lightning Network, we-- I released, released my first e-commerce plug-in for LND, and we soon realized that the next step, was helping onboarding, people. So we w-- there wasn't, there was not a, a solution, to, to simply, accept Bitcoin. And that was basically how, our open node started. Fantastic.

And so tell us a little bit then about The structure of the product and the fees in terms of, you know, what, what is OpenNode for somebody who doesn't really know much about it?

Okay, so, OpenNode, is here to make Bitcoin for everyday, so that's our mission, and we, we work hard every day to, make it easy for anyone, to accept Bitcoin, regardless of their business size, regardless of their location. So our product abstracts away all the complexity that comes with the Bitcoin protocol, the Lightning Network protocol, and we try to package that In a way that it's very simple for anyone to use it. So if you run an online store, for example, you can install one of our many plugins, and you can start accepting Bitcoin in minutes. you can also, optionally convert all your Bitcoin that you receive from your customers instantly into fiat and then avoid all volatility risk. If you're a developer, you can use our API, to add Bitcoin support to your application, and you won't have to worry about maintaining Payments infrastructure, which is usually very cumbersome. we want your focus to be on the, the actual game and application that you're building, and we will handle, the Bitcoin part of it, so you don't have to, to worry about it. our fee structure, we're trying to keep it simple. Right now, we're really focused on growing the network because that's our, that's our motto, that's why we started this company. So, we're really focused on just growing the network. That's why we're giving away the first- First ten thousand dollars that you receive, through OpenNode, that is free of charge. After that, we'll charge a one percent, on every incoming transaction. When it comes to withdrawals, those are free if you do them through Lightning, and we also offer, on-chain withdrawals are free if you opt into our weekly withdrawal batch. So we, we're trying to minimize on-chain, transactions by offering our customers a weekly batch they can opt into, and so we can minimize the amount of, Transactions we're putting into the actual blockchain.

Fantastic, and I think, yeah, we can get into more detail on some of those things, but first I wanted to talk a little bit about this offer that Roger Veer gave you and why you rejected that, because it was a lot of money. Can you tell us the story there on how that offer came about, you know, what it was and why your team rejected that?

Yeah, sure. So we were actually very surprised, I, I know who was watching the, it was a YouTube video. About Lightning Network and how long it will take to scale the Lightning, on Bitcoin, all that, propaganda. And actually, Rui watched the video until that, the last part. So I was like, okay, this sounds okay, this is a food, let's go. But after some, after some hours, we, some, the afternoon, Brandon was just calling me, I was like, oh, have you seen the Roger Ver video? I was like, what video? So I watched the video, and we were very surprised when we saw the offer. So basically, what Roger I will match team's one point twenty-five million in return for zero equity, just for you to add Bitcoin Cash. That was basically the offer. It was a public offer on the video. So yeah, I mean, that, that shows that Roger is our biggest supporter right now, by giving money for zero equity. We didn't, we didn't have that one before, so we were, we were happy with this proposal. Obviously, we didn't accept it, and why? First, we are a lighting, a lighting network company, so it didn't really make sense to add A coin to the platform that doesn't even support LN. So if you were to add a coin in the first place, it won't ever be through a bribe, that was basically what happened here. but because it's somehow aligned with, with our vision and our, our long-term goals as, as a company. So that was mainly the reason why we didn't accept in the first place and why we aren't, adding Bitcoin Cash to the platform.

Excellent story, and I mean, it's, it's, it's, it-- I can understand for a new business A lot of money, it could employ a lot of people, but you've chosen there to reject that because it's not in line with your underlying values and your underlying mission. So I think that brings the question then also of thoughts on altcoins and not supporting them. So the question then is, was this difficult in terms of raising funds? So for example, if your investors don't have the same vision or if they take a very short term view, there can be pressure to shitcoin.

Yeah. Sure, like first talking about a little bit about altcoins and why we don't support them is simply because right now we don't see an altcoin providing a better value proposition for payments than the BTC Lightning Network combo, and, the thing is, most of these altcoins' utility is to gamble and speculate. There isn't nothing really like useful there. so that, that's like the main reason why we aren't adding, altcoins. And also We don't want to support them because we are trying to reduce the risk for our users. So we have users from all over the world, like some place like Venezuela. So what type of message will, will we be sending by adding coins that will probably have SEC-filing implic-implications, like liquidity risks or are just straight-up exit scams? So I believe us, as a, as a company in this space, we have the responsibility to set a pre- a precedent of removing risk for our users and help them making thoughtful decisions on these complex and dangerous ecosystems. system. So was it difficult to raise, the funds? Yes, it was. we were very selective to who we choose to bring on as our investor, especially because this space is filled with a lot of, scammers and the, the misinformed. So I can, I can tell you that several of our prospective investor conversations went in with something like, "Can I add this coin to your platform?" And we are talking about people like Mark Cuban, for instance. so yeah, like to ensure we didn't tend, tend to our vows and vision, yeah, we brought one of the biggest Bitcoin bulls in the space, Tim Draper. we are very excited to have him on board because, he shares our long-term vision of hyperbitcoinization and mic-microtransactions, yeah.

Yeah, that's, I think that's a great idea there, that you, you need, really need investors who are aligned with your view and essentially also are willing to take a long term b- a view on this as well. I think that may have contributed to some of the other companies in this space who have kind of descended into altcoining and just pumping altcoins. Yeah. I think the other thing that some of the listeners would like to hear is just comparison of the trade-off Doffs between using open node versus using a self-hosted btpay server model. So obviously, I'm a fan of both approaches, I think they are complementary, but I think it'd be interesting to have you guys just tell us a little bit about the contrast.

Yeah, I agree, they can definitely be complementary solutions, and personally, I think the, the vision behind btpay server and the, the reason why Nicola started, started that whole project is definitely a mission that we, we stand behind. and where it comes to trade-offs, like the first thing we have to mention that is that first and foremost, OpenNode is a Bitcoin-only company, and that's a very big difference than the, the model that BTC Pay is going for. We don't accept any kind of Bitcoin forks or even altcoins. we think that supporting altcoins is a confusing, it ends up in a confusing user experience, especially for those that, that are new to the space, they don't really know which- Which coin they should be using, they don't know, which, which is the right version of Bitcoin, and we don't want to, go, we, we don't want our merchants to have to go through all of that, and we don't want our merch- our merchant customers to have to go through all of that. So, our mission is that to de-risk payment processing for our merchants by being clear from, from the very beginning that we are Bitcoin only, that's the way we intend to be for, for, for the time being, and, we We do that so we can stay away from all the confusion that is the altcoin, market right now. We don't know if some, some of them are securities, you don't know what's going on, some of, some of them are scams, some of them, they claim they're not. So we wanna stay away from that. We know Bitcoin is a solid project, and we wanna build on top of that foundation. BTC Pay server also has a more complex setup and maintenance process than us, obviously due to the nature of it being a open source project that you have to install on your own server. So you have to first get your own server, whether that be buy your own hardware or rent a server from, from some cloud provider. You have to spin up BTC Pay server, you have to maintain your BTC Pay server installation, you have to maintain your lightning channels, you have to- To fund them upfront, you have to buy incoming liquidity from services like Bitrefill, for example, you have to balance your channel. So there's a lot going on right there. And even after you're done with all that setup process, you then are fully responsible and reliant on your BTC Pay server installation. So if it goes down in the middle of a very busy day, let's say you're running a Black Friday sale and it's going really, really well, and all of a sudden your BTC Pay server's not working. Anymore. You're handling your customers, you're handling sales, you don't have time to go and fix the server, and if you have a team that can handle that for you, then that's great. But most likely than not, you won't have a technical team on demand ready and, with the expertise to handle whatever issue happened with your server. And anyone that's worked in the tech space knows that software isn't, you install it, you set it, and you forget it. It, that's never the case. In any software project as simple as it is, let alone in a thing as complex as a BTC Pay server, so it will need maintenance and you will need someone that can handle that. our proposition is that we handle all of that for you. So we handle the setup, the maintenance of our nodes, everything is done for you. The setup time is minutes, and you just have to sign up, you don't have to fund your channels, you don't have to spin up Bitcoin nodes, Lightning nodes, We have a team that's dedicated to make sure, our servers are working correctly, you can connect to us with no issues, you just have to worry about your business. If you have any issues, we have twenty-four seven customer support. We offer also, B-BTC Pay server doesn't have this feature, which is, the conversion of BTC to fiat. as much as we believe that we have hyperbitcoinization coming through, right now you need fiat to pay your bills, to pay your suppliers. To pay your employees, to play, to pay your, to pay your rent. So we, right now, we have this feature that we're calling Instant Exchange, which is, the conversion of the BTC to fiat at the time of the transaction to reduce volatility risk. So we can exchange fiat, BTC to fiat in multiple currencies, USD, Euro, GBP, the Mexican peso, Brazilian real, a few others, and we're actively trying to expand. And we will, at the time that you receive If a transaction, especially if it's through Lightning, because it settles instantly, as soon as we get it, we convert that for fiat, you can go into your dashboard, withdraw that to your bank account, and pay off whoever you need to pay off. aside from that, also you get the added benefit that since we're a hosted solution, we run our own, our own Lightning node, we've been doing that for a lo- for a while, so we acquired a lot of good channels, we have, we are very, very well connected to the network, so that means your, your customers more likely than not, they won't need to open up a channel, which obviously is a non-chain transaction, which takes a lot of time, and you, it, it's expensive in terms of fees, be- Because we're a hosted solution and a lot of peop-- we're very well connected, a lot of people will by default just be able to route a payment through the Lightning Network without having to set up, dedicated channel, with your, with your company, which is the case that, that if you're running your own BTC Pay server, Copy or software. so to finalize, BTC Pay Server, the trade-off, between BTC Pay Server and us is that you're being more self-sovereign, you're removing one hop out of the many, like you still have to trust your server provider, your internet connection provider, there's a lot of things that you still have to trust, but it is true that you don't have to trust your payment processor if you're your own payment processor, but obviously that comes with, it's a trade-off. Anything. So what, are, are the trade-off, what you're winning or gaining by adopting OpenNode is that now if you use OpenNode, you can focus on your own business and you don't need to focus on, running your own payment stack. And most, most likely than not, that will be the right call for your business if that's your, if that's your actual focus. If it's a side project, if you have a team dedicated to running your own payment stack, then sure, BTC Pay Server Makes a lot of sense in that case, but if not, then I would consider OpenNode to handle your

Bitcoin payments. Fantastic. And just talk a little bit about the setup time, associated with BTC Pay Server versus an OpenNode.

Yeah, so BTC Pay Server, I guess you can spin it up, using a Docker image, I believe is that, their current setup process. So if you're familiar with a Linux box, if you're familiar with Docker, you can get that, that set up fairly quickly. obviously not as quickly as just going to OpenNode dot co and signing up with your email, but, it's still fair, I would say it's still fairly quick. as to signing up for OpenNode, it's as easy as I said, go to OpenNode dot, OpenNode dot co, sign up with a valid email address. There's no KYC necessary to use our platform if you're only going to do, Bitcoin only transactions. and from there, if you're running, an online store, you can install one of our plugins for e-commerce platforms, and you can start accepting Bitcoin in minutes. if you have a retail business, we have this feature we're calling QuickInvoice, which allows you to, create invoices on the fly. So let's say you're, a coffee shop, and you want your customer to pay with, with, Bitcoin or Lightning, you can easily go, have a tablet, with OpenNode open, and you can just type in the amount he owes you, and he can scan a QR code and pay you. Right away, there's actually this coffee shop in Lisbon which is called The Block Café, and they're a Bitcoin focused, crypto focused coffee shop in Lisbon, they've been using, this feature for a long time and their customers. I think it's a great user experience for you to go into this coffee shop, have a beer, have some coffee, and pay a few dollars, using Lightning instantly. It's really-- it, it thrills us that we're, we're capable of providing this user experience to, to our merchants. And lastly, if you're a developer, we have, our API documentation. I would say that's the best way, that's the best place for you to get started. You can read through our API call and most likely then not, you will be able to create a Lightning app, let's say, or, or integrate Bitcoin payments into your app, very easily using OpenNode. I don't think BTC Pay Server offers, a, a comprehensive API when it comes to, at least The Lightning part of it, I, I believe they don't have, as many features as we have, when it comes to API, feature set.

Okay, cool, cool. And now let's talk about the setup process then. So how do users set up with OpenNode?

Okay, so as I said before, we require just a valid email address. We'll ask for your name, but that's just for reference, so we can address you by name in your email. You can go on OpenNode dot co, you can sign up. from there, you will have, we just added this feature last, last week, which is kind of like a tutorial, which will help you familiarize yourself with OpenNode and all the features we have, because we keep adding on features, but we want you to know which, which feature does what and what feature features you need for your business. So as I said before, if you're running an e-commerce shop, we currently offer plugins for PrestaShop, WooCommerce, and a few others. You will see all of those if you go into the tool section, of our website. if you're running, a retail business, as I said before, you can use QuickInvoice. if you're using an API, you can go into our settings page, create an API key. It's, a pretty standard setup when it comes to, to API development. So I would say it's very easy for anyone, anyone that wants to sell using Bitcoin, that wants to accept Bitcoin in their business, they can get set up in less than five minutes if they're running a store, if they're running, if they want, if you're a developer and you want to create your own app, even still, you can integrate OpenNode with literally two HTTP calls and that's it. That's actually what many, Lightning apps we see right now powered through OpenNode, they just need those two API Calls and that's it when it comes to handling Lightning transactions, and we think that's, that's, that's the way you, if you want to create a Lightning app, you don't, you, sure you can be the most, the, the technical expert when it comes to Lightning, and that's, we go off, we're all for that, but if you just like Lightning and you want, you have this cool idea, you want to try it out, see if it works, having that done with two HEDB calls and then you can focus on creating your app, we think that That's what we want to, that's the experience we want to provide. So, yeah, that's, that's our setup process.

Yeah, fantastic. And maybe you can tell us, you mentioned there are already some Lightning, services or games that are already using OpenNode. Do you wanna mention a couple of those? Like, I know for example, obviously TallyCoin is using, an interface with OpenNode. Do you have any other examples that you wanna bring up?

yeah, the,

you know, the crypto games. it's Crypto, they have, a lot of different g-ray games. It's Crypto with a K. they offer a ton of games. It's really fun to play. We, we actually were playing that just before we were waiting for this, podcast. We're playing some of that. There's also Lightning Spin that I created. That's powered through OpenNode, PoKtoshi. João created that. It's also powered through

OpenNode. Yeah, and the new game that, Follow will announce, probably soon is also, the infrastructure is open note. So we starting, and we start to see a lot of people, building on top of us, which is really cool. as Rui said, it's basically two API calls, it's really easy to set up, and I think that's why, we are, people are, testing us out.

Excellent. Okay, so let's talk about tech support now. So obviously part of the reason you're running this company is you're trying to make it easy for your process and are your customers having many issues?

Yeah, sure. So, to start, we are a t- a team of seven people, and all of us, actively participate in, in the support tickets. It doesn't matter what time you, you, you talk with us, someone is going to reply to your issue, because fortunately, we live in different time zones, so that's a cool thing. So basically our goal is make sure that every issue is solved in a timely manner, and we want our customers to feel safe with us, like that's our biggest priority. Surprisingly, most of the issues have been questions about adding like new features to the platform, like either to the API or to the, the platform itself. for instance, we had to add a feature to allow concert to sell tickets for the dinner, they just, released it today. we also are working on a- A feature called custom checkouts, that basically allows you to create, checkout presets. so basically we are working now with Baltic on a badger conference, we are building this for them so they can sell tickets to the event. but besides the new features thing, I wouldn't say we are, we are facing a lot of issues. we had some lightning withdrawal issues, in the past when the network was still, growing, but to be honest, lately we haven't had any problems. so- Hopefully it stays this way.

Fantastic, okay. And now let's talk about, so you mentioned there one of the distinguishing features for you was really helping make sure that your support is high quality and that your customers have an easy, smooth experience. Are there any other distinguishing features of OpenNode versus other providers that you would like to point out?

Yeah, so again, I will have to say this again, I hope I'm not being annoying, but we, we are a Bitcoin only company, and you don't see many of those currently, especially not in the payments processing, space. that's a big differentiator between us and, everyone processing payments right now. Our users are our biggest priority, and the last thing we want is to confuse them with a multitude of scam coins. we're also really, really focused on design. I hope that you can tell that, everyone can tell that by going through, through our website, through our landing page, our dashboard, our custom- Check out experience and everything, everything we do is really, we put a lot of thought, we try to make it as easy as possible, as pleasant as possible to, to use, and our design-centric culture is something that That's, it's been this way since day one, this way since day one, and, we're trying to keep it that way. on a technical level, our API is, is, was specifically tailored and was modeled after the APIs we actually like to use, and, as I said before, integrating with, with our API shouldn't, shouldn't really be harder than making two, HTTP calls, and we try to make it possible that everything you can do Through our, through our dashboard, you can do programmatically. So we want to, you will want you to explore every possibility you can possibly think of, a-and that isn't the case with many of, other payment processors. They put a lot of restrictions because they don't want you to automate, they don't want you to do things a certain way. So for example, Lightning withdrawals, this is something that most other, payment processors that support the Lightning network, they don't allow you to, for some reason, to programmatically- Withdraw to, a specific Lightning invoice, and what that causes is that you can really build apps that have that flow of receiving payments and also paying out, to your customers. So we don't, we want you to explore all the possibilities, so we've built our API to reflect that.

So let's just, let's touch on that a little bit. I think that's a really interesting point there. So it means your customers of OpenNode, let's say they want to run their own game or their own app, what you're saying there is essentially they can set up their own API such that You know, they will take a lightning withdrawal from OpenNode through their app and that could go into the customer's own account, right? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. That's, that's one of the things that we're currently at this moment doing, with apps like Crypto, Lightning Spend, upcoming app by Lightning Koala, we'll also be able to do that, which is, which is the actual fun part because paying for things is the-- is one thing that is really cool with Lightning, the whole thing about micropayments, you can pay fractions of a- Sent and then you can also do that instantly, which is amazing. But obviously we want that flow, which, which is even harder with the current banking system, which is you pay for a service and then for, for some reason you make money or you, you win something and you want to get that money back You can't do that with credit cards, you can't, with, you can, you could do it maybe with a bank, a bank wire, but obviously that's way too cumbersome, no one's doing that. so that's a huge, a huge case that is huge for us and, we're, we're very happy that a lot of our users adopted that, way of doing things where you can receive a payment and then withdraw to your customer's wallet. And this also allows us, even though we're a custodial solution, this allows us to power Our, platforms that are as least custodial as possible, because you can get your money in and get your money out when you want it for free. We don't charge any fees, even though we get charged maybe a few satz if we go through a lot of ops in the way, which hopefully isn't the case, but we do it for free, and your customers can withdraw to any Lightning wallet. So yeah, that's definitely, a use case we're powering right now. the last point I wanted to touch- John, when coming back to our differentiators, versus other payment providers, is that we also have, as I said before, the Bitcoin to fiat exchange, and we're actually, talking with multiple banking partners and trying to establish as many relationship, as relationships as possible to make sure we somehow decentralize our, way of doing banking, in case we get, shut down by one company, we can keep, going by being powered through another company. company and also obviously this, this will help us lower our rates when it comes to Bitcoin to fiat, exchange where we, we are trying to actively lower our rates and not only that, obviously expand to more currencies, more countries and hopefully someday be, be powering the entire world when it comes to fiat If we get there, if Bitcoin, if hyperbitcoinization doesn't happen first, we'll see. It's exciting times.

The other question I had, I'm not sure if you touched on this earlier, is how, how old is the company? When did you guys start? And, you know, about roughly how old are you now?

so yeah, we start, May last year, so I would say we have, almost, almost, almost one year. Yeah, okay.

We're very young. It's, it's a very quickly developing space. okay. And so let's talk now a little bit with the plans over the next year or so with OpenNode.

Yeah, so we, we, we've seen, we are growing exponentially. So like from December to January, I can tell we grew like two hundred and, around two hundred and thirty 3% on transaction volume, which is crazy. So yeah, to keep up with our growth, one of the plans we have obviously, we'll, we'll focus on hiring people and keep developing our platform to, allow us to enter into multiple industries. we are specific-- so we are especially, interested in the gaming and streaming industry, which we believe the microtransactions, Could strive comparing to the current traditional models. another thing that we are looking at is that currently, there are no microtransaction payment interactions that can't be done because the wallets aren't just not there yet. So we don't have the experience or we, we are, we are improving with the Lightning Journal, for instance, but I don't think we are yet in the experience where I'm watching a video and somehow I'm being charged in the backend. we don't have that wallet yet or that protocol yet. So depending on how that space evolves, we will probably might just have to build ours to achieve the, the experience we want to provide, so that's on, on our, on our roadmap. and as we touched, before, we obviously want to expand our fiat to BTC exchange coverage, so we are actually currently in conversations, with a few liquidity providers, to find out how we can work together and, basically expand this coverage as, to as much countries as, as possible. So yeah, like this space is, is evolves very fast, it's, it's hard to keep, to keep the pace. As you say, we, we aren't even one year old and this is, it, it's a crazy space. we, we, we like what we are doing, we think we are providing, value to the, to the space, and, we will, if we feel that there is something, that we need to add, to change, we will do so.

Excellent, and I think you touched on this idea of gaming and streaming being a good area that you can expand into. Maybe if you could just tell the listeners a little bit, maybe those who aren't as familiar with gaming and streaming, what are the typical ways that people who are streamers would use or could use Bitcoin and Lightning in ways that maybe they're not doing so right now?

So there is a big problem on streaming, is, is, is there is a big problem on streaming, especially on donations, let's say. So right now, you, if you go on Twitch, you see this famous, streamer getting twenty k dollars. And after a while, you can see that, that, that transaction was a char- a chargeback fraud. So you received twenty k, but you don't really receive the twenty k dollars, because whoever was paying was using a, a fake credit card or a stolen credit card. So the normal- Donation thing on streaming is something that we are also interested in, but I feel like the interactions with, with the people, the fact that, let's say, pay-per-view. So today, when, when, when you have a UFC fight or something, you pay a flat price, to watch the show. What if I don't watch, don't want, what if I just want to watch the main show? I don't want to watch the other fights. Why do I need to pay for the whole show when I use less infrastructure than the other people are using when they watch the full So, so it's not fair. So what we are trying, what we, what it's our vision here is to try to scale, let's say the pricing as you use the infrastructure. So why not pay per minute or pay per specific byte of data? Like, I think these use cases will, will be really interesting in the future, Because basically you are paying as you use. So let's say it's, it's somehow what the Amazon use right now for their, its technologic infrastructure. So you pay as you go, and in the end they bill you. What if Amazon could, could bill you as you use? So that's, because right now they have, let's say, negative cash flow because you're only paying in the end of the month. So what if they can pay, they can get paid exactly when you are using their resources? So it's, it's, it's, it's more around That exploring that the, the feature that we can do instant settlements, we n-in s-in and we can transfer really small amounts of, of, Dollars, in this case, satoshis.

Yeah, and also a few days ago or a few weeks ago actually, someone dropped this game, that was fully powered by Lightning and they were streaming it on Twitch, and the concept was that you could pay some Satoshi to, create a monster that, that they would have to fight, and everyone was watching the, some guy play this game, and while they were watching, they could be spawning monsters or spawning some help for, for, for whoever was playing, and the con- Tips like that, you just can't do that, with the current, fiat system, man. That's something we're really, really excited to explore. Game-- the gaming industry is an industry that's been using micropayments forever now, and it's a huge, like, they will release games for free just to have them fully funded by micropayments. That's how big, micropayments are right now. But obviously since, since the cost of doing an actual micropayments are so big Take, they have to charge you upfront, so you have to top up your account with, say, ten bucks, twenty bucks, and then you can use that balance to pay for the actual stuff you're using. And with Lightning, you don't need that. You, if you want a ten cents item in game, you can buy it with ten actual cents, you don't need to top, to top up your account with ten bucks. And use cases like that are just, I think those are just the things that we can instantly translate from the current fiat model to, Bitcoin model, I think honestly there will be other use cases that we can even, we can even, reason about them right now because they just don't exist yet and we need someone, some genius mind to come up with them and we'll see, we'll see what those models are, but being able to, to pay less than a cent and to withdraw less than, than, than a cent will be a, will be a game changer for sure, and there's obviously a lot, Models like, Nick Zavo says that there are barriers to mental, mental barriers to microtransactions, I think those things will be overcome, by just the user experience, things like, like, João said, the Lightning Jewel wallet allows you to be paying without even, you just authorize, a website to charge you up until some certain amount that you feel safe with, and you can just play and you're paying you, and The, the whole thing is so smooth that it's just a one and joyful experience, and we're, we're really excited to be powering that next wave of applications.

Yeah, and I think that's, yeah, that's all fantastic as well. That's kind of the next frontier, and I think the other angle which some Bitcoiners are talking about now is this angle of children. Children who want to take payments can set up a Lightning wallet once, once the tech gets there, once the software gets there, they can easily set up a Lightning wallet, and they can now take part and start earning. Some coin even.

Yeah, obviously, right now it's, a, a child can't have a credit card, so even if their parents want to give them an allowance of, say, ten dollars for their favorite game, it's obviously a very cumbersome experience. They, they have to go into their Fortnite game and type in their credit card details, and then they won't know if-- How can they know, be sure that, the, their, their son or daughter just uses the ten bucks, they can use hundreds or, or even thousands, and that's actually a very big problem problem for, for the gaming company, so definitely being able to, to use a permissionless system that doesn't care about how old you are, because why should it? If you use a system like that, you can send, ten dollars to, to your child, and have them use them, whatever, however they want, and no one can-- no one will care because this is Bitcoin. At the end of the day, a Lightning Network is Bitcoin, and it ha-- it shares all the same properties, that being one of them. And, yeah, that is actually a, a very big use case that we're, we're excited to see how it, how it, will evolve. And I think that actually ties really well with the game Gaming use case because, well, obviously adults game too, we game too at, at, at our office, we're, we're gaming all the time, but, well, not all the time, but we game, yeah, we game a lot. So, so obviously not only children play, play, but they're obviously a big market for, for these companies, and I think having a safe way for, for them to pay for things in their favorite games, and that makes them feel safe and obviously make their, parents' credit card also safe. That, that will be huge for sure.

Fantastic. And the other question I was keen to ask you guys is around any difficulties that you have faced in creating your product and creating your service, whether they are maybe technological difficulties or pa-pa

Okay, yeah. So touching on specifically on, on that last point, yeah, we had, difficulties on setting up bank accounts, either for the company paychecks and also for the operation of the product itself. we had our first bank account shut down. we had to find, another bank. fortunately now, we also tried to use Trans-Transferwise, because me and Rui, are not from the US, so we- We, we want to receive Eurus, so obviously we would, we were trying to get the less, the fea-the less, fee solution possible. Transferwise also denied us. And regarding more the operation of the platform, we recently actually contacted Silver Bank. I'm not sure if you are, familiar with Silvergate Bank. I'm not sure you are familiar with it, but they do-- Oh, no. Yeah, they do a lot of crypto stuff. And the first thing they asked was like, "Okay, you, you require at least one million on your account balance and ten million if you are dealing with digital currencies, exchanges." And we were like, "We are a startup, we are starting, how can this, how can..." The barrier to get in, it's, it's really high, and this, the, it, it makes us sad because we are trying to, to, to provide us a, a valuable service here, and we can't because all these companies are either banning what we are doing or they, their, their, their limits to entry on their product are too huge for what we can do right now. So, yeah, that, that's been our experience so far. it's a little bit, We had, we had, we had difficulties, fortunately we overcome most of them. the platform is working, obviously we want to improve, but we'll see what the fut- the future will bring.

Yeah, just to touch on the, the technical difficulties, we, yeah, obviously since we're pioneers in the space, we actually faced a lot of difficulties, not only tech- in a technical sense, but also in a user experience, in a user experience sense. So, for instance, we just yesterday we sp- Spend like two hours just discussing how should we name a feature because no one has done it before, so it's very hard for us to be naming these things, we wanna set a good precedent and make sure our product is usable. And when it comes to the technical, actual technical difficulties in the beginning, because we started this in May and the Lightning Network was about two or three months old, so obviously back then it was hard, harder to route payments, harder to, people didn't understand Understand, for example, like why can't I get this payment to my account? They didn't understand the channel balance, that the channels are bi-directional, so you need, inbound liquidity to be able to receive payments. So a lot of that we just overcome through education, we overcome through having our, our customer support being educating people constantly on this issue. we faced some, some issues with, with L, with LND because it- We faced some race conditions and, it was at some point we had, someone on Lightning spend being able to withdraw more money than they had, so, we had to fix that. Fortunately, they were, they were good actors, so they contacted me right away. But these are some of the things that come with being Early adopters in any kind of technology, you will run into issues and that was obviously the case with us too. Fortunately, none of them were, were too serious now, but yeah, there, there were some. The fiat difficulties obviously were much, ten times, a hundred times more, more dramatic than, than all the technical issues we had to date. It's been, it's been a struggle to, to, to survive, but fortunately right now we found a, a good solution that, that has been working. Working fine for us for, for the moment.

Excellent. And I had another question just around, so you mentioned some of the technical difficulties and obviously in the, in the early days of Lightning Network, it was harder to route because of obviously the need for good channel management. Did you notice much in terms of payment failures, as in customers trying to make a payment but then it failed because they couldn't find a route? And has that improved over time?

Yeah, so w- as we said before, we offer the Lightning withdrawals. So yeah, in the beginning, I touched this point on the customer support. In the beginning, a lot of people were having, some people were having like Lightning withdrawal issues, like, "Why isn't my payment going through? Why, why did I get this error feedback?" But it was li- it was the- The network liquidity was too small to operate like in a smooth way. Fortunately today, I, I don't, I don't remember a ticket, I don't remember the last ticket talking about Lightning withdrawals to be honest with you. so yeah, I think today we are way better on, on that, specifically because the network has growth a lot. we are like around six hundred BTC right now. It's, it's just been, it's just crazy. And second, our, our node is well connected, way better connected right now, so we have a lot of inbound and outbound liquidity, so that helps also to provide this smooth, error, no errors experience.

Alright. Well, look, I think they're basically the key points I wanted to ask about. I think, it's a really in-impressive thing that you guys are doing with a Bitcoin only Lightning kind of smooth, easy, safe- Set up. Do you wanna just tell the listeners where they can, you know, any final comments and where they can go to obviously find you, OpenNode dot co. Anything else you would like to point out to them?

Yeah, I would actually, love to ask you a question. Oh, sure. Change the ball. So we would love to ask you, what's your experience, what has been your experience with OpenNode? I know you are using TallyCoin, what was your first impression?

Oh, exactly, yeah, that's a, yeah, fair, fair point. Yeah, That, DJ Booth double o seven, the creator of TallyCoin, had set up an interface there. And personally, I found it very easy. So for me, it was, you know, just like signing up for any web service, you go to opennode dot co, you sign up. And basically all I had to do was copy paste the API key over to the TallyCoin, box, and then straight away, you know, payments started coming through Lightning Network, payments started working. So I thought it was a really smooth, easy experience. So yeah, definitely a good, good, good thinking for you to raise that question as well. So I, I found it very easy to use, and every now and again I just jump on the dashboard, and you can sort of see how many, you know, Satoshi payments have come through and so on. You can withdraw them. I've had, yeah, no issues so far, very easy, very good experience.

Thank you for the feedback.

Yeah, we're always looking for, for feedback on, on how we can im-improve. just to touch on how we can, where you can find us, obviously our, our website is at openone dot co, and we're also very active on Twitter, and that's where we denied Roger Veirs offer. So if you wanna know about our next denial live, you, you should follow us on Twitter. We are at open- No CO, and yeah, that said, we're all very, very easy to find if you have any questions, if you want to, develop the next Lightning app, and you don't wanna worry about your payment stack, definitely hit us up. We have, we're more than happy to, to guide us, guide you through our documentation if you have any questions, and that goes for developers, but obviously also for merchants, we're, we're very happy to, to be in this space, and we're looking forward to, to help every- Everyone start accepting

Bitcoin. Fantastic, well, thank you very much, Rui and Joao. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Was amazing. So what did you think of OpenNode? I personally think it's really cool how there are so many different options evolving in this space, and as I mentioned, from my use of OpenNode so far, it has been very smooth and easy to use in terms of powering Bitcoin Lightning donations via TallyCoin. They've recently started an affiliate program too, so I'll leave my ref link in the podcast show notes. Go and use it to go and get started Show notes are on my website, stephanalivera dot com, and just a reminder to share the episode if you got value out of it. Thanks guys, and chat next time.