The definitive guide to onboard newcoiners to Lightning with NFC

Onboarding new people to Lightning is often times complicated, time-consuming and let's be honest: just not the best experience for first-time users. LNURL & NFC allow you to completely skip the process of sending around invoices or scanning QR-codes and offer your audience a very neat way to receive their first 🌽 by just approaching their phone to a NFC tag.

I've personally used this setup at meetups, during presentations about Bitcoin and at conference booths and I will guarantee you will get to see some stunned faces. 🤯

Check out this video if you want to see a ⚡ Lightning NFC tag in action:

https://twitter.com/dvadesetjedan21/status/1523334460942413825

📃 What you will need

• Bitcoin Lightning wallet with some sats in it

• NFC tag
  They come in all forms: tags, cards, stickers, etc. Just make sure you get one with enough capacity to store a LNURL (200 Byte should probably be enough)

• Phone with NFC capabilities

💻 LNURL Setup

This example will cover how you would setup the LNURL-withdraw link with LNBits. You can of course use any other provider that will allow you to create such a link. (LNBits on your own node, lnpay.co, others?)

1. Go to legend.lnbits.com, create a new wallet and fund it with some sats from your wallet

2. Enable the plugin LNURLw and open the extension

3. Create a new "Advanced withdraw link" and configure the settings like shown here:
   

4. Open the withdraw link by clicking on the icon at the very left
   

5. Click "Copy LNURL"

🏷️ Preparing the NFC tag

Now we want to write this LNURL to the tag. Get yourself a NFC app for your phone (I can recommend NFC Tools for Android).

Add a record of type "Custom URL / URI" and insert the LNURL from before prefixed with lightning: like shown here:

Write the new contents to the tag and we are ready to do our first withdrawal. 💯

🚀 Withdrawal

Now comes the fun part. Install a Lightning app on your phone. You might want to consider one of the following ones:

• BlueWallet (custodial by default)

• Breez

• Muun

• Phoenix

• Wallet of Satoshi (custodial)

⚠️ Some of the apps will charge you some premium for your very first transaction (Breez, Phoenix, etc) as they allow you to use the Lightning network in a non-custodial manner and need to open a channel to the node running on your phone. You might want to consider using a custodial wallet to avoid initial fees when giving out small amounts. "Wallet of Satoshi" has definitely one of the fastest onboarding flows I have seen so far.

👾 3 Upgrades

1) Mounting pad

While swiping a card to withdraw is already impressive I wanted to hide away the NFC tag for an even more magical experience. 🪄 This is the pad I 3D-printed and is currently used to mount the NFC tag:

2) Welcome mesage

By setting the title of the link in LNBits you can basically set the comment for the transaction your users will receive. Make sure to welcome them with a proper message:

3) Backup QR-Codes

Some phones don't have a NFC reader (or it is disabled by default). You can simply offer an alternative way to withdraw by printing a QR code with the same content. (lightning:LNURL...)

🚩Addendum

The case against giving out sats for free has been made and has been proven true to me with some rare exceptions.

https://twitter.com/dergigi/status/1438988873061658629?s=20&t=HruzauwY3N5mAIoN3JFKEg

Gifted sats are lost sats, usually.