Introducing Fehu

Product description 🚀

Fehu is a mobile app for creating (recurring) payment streams over lightning. I published this concept two years ago in a Medium post called "Redefining streaming payments". But it took this tournament, quitting my job, and the BOLT12 specification to make this concept a reality.

Problems & opportunities 🚨

The digitalization of products and services has gone into hyperdrive causing huge shifts in customer behavior. As a result, a growing number of companies are exploring new consumer-focused business models, like ‘pay-per-use’. Combine this with the urgency to save on every penny, and you'll end up with a customer desire to pay for the smallest units possible.

How about paying for every second you watch a movie, for every foot of distance driven, or every watt of electricity used? Streaming payments allow both individuals and companies (as service providers) to create these fine-grained offers and share this with customers through a single QR barcode.

How it’s built 🛠

For full transparency and details, more "stories" will be written on this platform as this journey continues to develop. Luckily most of the concept ideas from "Redefining streaming payments" are still usable as input for scenarios and app redesigns. For the app design, I'll be using Figma as my primary tool. Thanks to the Bitcoin Design community there is a nice (yet slightly bloated) template file that I can reuse. Something else I can't wait to get started on is BOLT12. This specification wasn't made public when I released the Medium post but seems to suit this use case perfectly. I can be found on both the technical bolt12.org Telegram channel and the Bitcoin Design Community Slack channel for discussions on this topic. As for the lightning node, Core Lightning (CLN) is the preferred choice for now. And for app development, most (if not all) code is written in Dart using the Flutter framework. Since everything is open-source, the code will be published on GitHub.

Blockers & Issues ✋

If there is one elephant in the room, then it's called BOLT12. At the moment there is no full implementation library available for Dart. I'm not sure how much of this is going to be an issue. Getting a fully working BOLT12 Dart implementation before the tournament deadline will be challenging. However, creating a mobile app with mocked/stubbed data should be possible.