No Big Deal: ZEBEDEE Contributes to Bitcoin Lightning Network Open Source Development

ZEBEDEE, a crypto startup focused on payment solutions using the fast Lightning Network, has launched a new initiative to contribute open source code and products to the Layer 2 protocol built on top of Bitcoin.

Called No Big Deal (NBD), the new not-for-profit project has already resulted in several products and code repositories available to anyone willing to build on the Lightning Network.

As noted by Andre Neves, co-founder and CTO of ZEBEDEE, NBD is not about selling or endorsing products or services. Instead, it’s about the startup writing code and giving it away to the world so that anyone can take any part of it and use it – or transform it at will – to build their own products.

“We basically created an entire suite of tools for the modern sovereign individual, from the client you would use to set up a node, to the wallet you would use to manage your money in a self-sovereign manner,” Neves said in a statement. “It’s important for us to have something real, concrete and useful to show before we talk about it, so this has actually been a long time coming. But it’s not really a big deal.”

ZEBEDEE and Open Bitcoin Wallet

The first wave of NBD products includes the Open Bitcoin Wallet (OBW) – a non-custodial Bitcoin Lightning wallet – and revolves around the new concept of Hosted Channels, which removes the need for Bitcoin to be locked into a Lightning channel for payments to be able to move.

“The focus on Hosted Channels for this first wave of releases is because we believe that it is one of the most promising methods to scale Bitcoin through the Lightning Network to the masses in a superb way, while maintaining simple UX,” said Neves Decrypt.

According to ZEBEDEE’s CTO, one of the notorious problems with onboarding users to the Lightning network in a non-custodial way is that one cannot receive or send funds until they have enough incoming and outgoing liquidity.

This barrier to entry represents quite a technical challenge, and pushes away many users who are not so technically savvy.

“With Hosted Channels, an unprotected Lightning Wallet (eg OBW) can be set up in seconds by requesting a Hosted Channel from an LSP (Lightning Service Provider). This is a reliable setup, but only temporary . Once users have earned enough Bitcoin through these host channels, they can open regular Lightning channels,” Neves said.

He explained that in the current model, every time a Lightning channel is opened, there are associated fee costs associated with the chain, and one must wait for a transaction to be included in a block. With hosted channels, an LSP can provide liquidity “on the fly, without having to unlock funds/pay fees, just to be able to route payments from and to this new user.”

“The goal is to ease onboarding and reduce capital requirements for new onboarding users, while providing a clear path to move from this hybrid model to a fully non-custodial model,” added Neves.

As for what makes the Open Bitcoin Wallet unique, Neves said “it’s one of the only Bitcoin and Lightning Network wallets that supports the full suite of LNURL protocols,” which serve as a method of communication between Lightning wallets and external applications and third-party services.

According to Neves, “this means requesting that the Lightning channel be opened through the LNURL Channel, this means paying to static Lightning QR codes through LNURL Pay, signing in with Lightning through LNURL Auth (a rapidly growing authentication method for apps and services) , also as support for withdrawing from services through LNURL Withdrawal.”

Additionally, OBW supports native sending to email-like Lightning addresses (e.g. send 100 rate to [email protected]) regardless of vendor, as well as thorough coin control management to allow segregation of UTXOs for privacy-conscious users.

Spins up a Lightning node

The first batch of NBD products also includes a CoreLightning (CLN) plugin that allows a node operator to run and service hosted channels for wallets like OBW, but developers said they are already looking at other areas of open source development — not necessarily focused on Lightning or host channels.

“NBD is cypherpunk. NBD writes code. We will continue to post software, ideas, protocols, research on Bitcoin and Lightning Network development. That said, without giving too much away, we think there is a lot of utility in technologies like Drivechains and Spacechains, as well as adjacent protocols dealing with decentralized information sharing like Nostr,” said Neves Decrypt.

Importantly, he added, the team’s “goal is not to focus on building generic trading tools for general trading, but to really demystify the idea behind being a modern self-sovereign individual on Bitcoin.”