Extending bitcoin's adoption on web

When it comes to pushing for greater bitcoin and lightning adoption and developer onboarding, BOLT🔩FUN has always taken a web-first approach. There are a few reasons for this.

Firstly, users have greater access to the web than any other locally stored application. Accessibility can be one of the biggest hurdles for the adoption of technology, we hope to minimise this risk as much as possible. Secondly, web development is the most popular form of development today - if we want to onboard new developers and designers into the lightning ecosystem, it makes sense to start with the web layer.

Stack Overflow’s 2021 survey lists Javascript + HTML as the most commonly used languages by developers. For many people, programming is web programming.

Finally, we believe bitcoin has the potential to improve upon existing Web2.0 architecture when it comes to payments, authentication, and privacy.

Today, there are approximately 5 billion people who have access to the web. Last year, Chrome reported to have 3.2 billion users.

With the use of a few easy-to-install extensions, these users can gain access to bitcoin & lightning's potential for borderless payments, value-4-value economies, savings and rewards, plus much more.

Here are some of our favourite bitcoin and lightning Chrome extensions 🧩👇

i. Alby

Alby is a bitcoin wallet extension that lives in your web browser, giving you access to lightning fast payments and authentication. Alby uses WebLN to communicate between web app's and users' lightning nodes in a secure way, providing a programmatic, permissioned interface for letting applications ask users to send payments, generate invoices to receive payments, and much more.

🌐 Website: https://getalby.com

ii. Pay with Moon

Purchase prepaid Visa cards with bitcoin or lightning and pay at millions of online merchants with secure virtual cards. A virtual card is a temporary digital payment card that can be used to make online purchases. Moon Cards are virtual cards that can be loaded with lightning, converted to USD at the moment of purchase and immediately available to spend where you want.

🌐 Website: https://paywithmoon.com/

iii. Strike

Strike allows you to buy, sell, send, and receive bitcoin from your browser, send funds anywhere in the world in seconds with no added fees. Users can easily tip on the web, remit money, pay merchants for goods and services, and make lightning fast payments with friends.

🌐 Website: https://strike.me/

iv. Satsback

Satsback allows you to shop online and earn bitcoin cashback and loyalty rewards whenever you make a purchase. All you have to do is browse thousands of selected online retailers on their website, follow their links and shop online, and finally earn a percentage % of what you spent back in bitcoin, paid out via the Lightning Network.

🌐 Website: https://satsback.com/

v. Lolli

Similar to Satsback, users can add Lolli to their browsers and begin earning up to 30% bitcoin cashback rewards whenever they shop at any of Lolli's selected retailers.

🌐 Website: https://www.lolli.com/

vi. ZEBEDEE

ZEBEDEE is a browser extension wallet that allows gamers to power their own online gaming experiences with bitcoin. Built to accompany ZEBEDEE's mobile lightning wallet, users can download the extension and easily link their existing account by scanning a QR code - giving them access to lightning payments within their browser in seconds.

🌐 Website: https://zebedee.io/

vii. Bitpay

Bitpay offers users access to thousands of gift cards from some of the world's most popular brands, easily purchased using bitcoin. Users can now spend bitcoin instantly at hundreds of brands with BitPay's new browser extension.

🌐 Website: https://bitpay.com/

viii. LNbits

LNbits Link is a light browser extension that allows users to connect to any existing LNbits server and make payments in the browser. Development of the extension has slowed down since its release, with more focus being put towards their Legend / Infinity stacks. If there are any developers looking to work on a browser extension, this could be a great opportunity to revive this project.

We thought about updating it, but Alby do such a great job. Maybe at some point we will update, but its very low priority. - Ben Arc, LNbits Core Dev

🌐 Website: https://github.com/bitcoincoretech/lnbits-link