Idea: Converting an email address to a user-defined lightning address.

Hi, I'm an experienced Fullstack developer looking for someone to join me for this project idea for the tournament's Global Adoption Track (preferably someone with frontend experience).

Many websites use the users' email address as the signin username - even if it is not displayed to other users. It's more convenient for many reasons: recovering a forgotten password, not having to remember a username, no collisions between two users who want the same username, etc.

Websites like gravatar.com allow to attach a photo and metadata to your email-address. Once the user has uploaded his public information, every website can fetch this information - especially the photo that can be displayed automatically in forums etc. No need to re-upload the profile photo in every website, and it's easy to keep it updated.

Lightning addresses are not email addresses. [email protected]'s lightning address could be a totally different address - and if John is running his own node behind tor with an onion address, his full lightning address will be very long and ugly.

A simple solution could be that John will upload his lightning address to Gravatar - and when some website, or anybody that know's John's email, want to send John some funds - they could use the Gravatar api to get John's lightning address. This will require some complex implementations in wallets and websites, but it's is possible.

A cooler solution would be that they simply send the funds to [email protected] (yes, ".email" is a valid top-level domain, like ".com" and ".org"). ln2.email backend only needs to find John's real lightning address in its database, and forward the relevant http requests. There's even an added privacy feature here because people who send payments to [email protected] will not know John's final lightning address (they could only know the node address, I think).

Progress made so far:

1. Buying the domain ln2.email (i.e. "lightning to email").

2. Writing this story.

What do you think? Have you heard of a similar project that already exists? Do you want to team up? There is also some frontend to design needed here, for users to log-in with their email to ln2.email and fill their lightning address (and some verification email to prove that they own the email address).

P.S.

Gravatar does allow to add a "Bitcoin address" in the metadata fields. I think they meant an on-chain address. I've never heard of anyone using it or any wallet supporting it somehow.