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The definitive guide to onboard newcoiners to Lightning with NFC
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René AaronRené Aaron
Joined 2022.08.02
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#lightning#on-chain
The definitive guide to onboard newcoiners to Lightning with NFC

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.