A few months ago we announced Strike, an easy to use, stripe-like API for Lightning. It was only available for Bitcoin testnet, and today we open it on Bitcoin mainnet.

Why an API for Lightning?

The Lightning Network is a high performance trustless payment network built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. It enables instant payments with very low fees, even for very small amounts.

We are proud members of the Lightning development community, and we have released and are maintaining all the open source tools that you need to run a Lightning node and “be your own payment processor”. But we believe that some businesses may be interested in a tradeoff where they get most of the benefits of Lightning, while keeping their integration costs as low as possible. This is what Strike is about: add Lightning payments to your business in no time and with as little impact on your operations as possible.

With Strike, receiving Lightning payments will look very familiar to any web developer: it boils down to making an API call and listening to a webhook event.

How does it work? We receive lightning payments on your behalf, aggregate them and periodically send an on-chain bitcoin transaction to your wallet.

In other words, you can offer instant and cheap payments to your customers, and you still get paid with the good old on-chain Bitcoin transactions that you are used to.

Wait… doesn’t that make you a trusted 3rd party?

Yes, it does, but our service only requires a minimum level of trust, because we send you an on-chain Bitcoin transaction whenever the aggregate amount reaches a configurable threshold.

For example, if you set your withdraw threshold to 0.1 BTC, then you will never trust us for more than 0.1 BTC.

Are there other benefits to using Strike?

In addition to making it easy to integrate Lightning payments to your checkout process, Strike brings two additional benefits:

By using Strike, and because automated payouts are free, you completely shield yourself and your customers from on-chain fees that are unpredictable and subject to significant variations.

Because payments are aggregated, your wallet ends up managing a smaller UTXO set with higher amounts, as opposed to a very high number of UTXOs with tiny amount, that could be difficult to spend if on-chain fees go up in the future.

How much will you charge for this service?

We take a 1% fee on payments, and that’s it. Automated payouts to your Bitcoin wallet are free of charge, because we batch them among merchants. The threshold for automated withdrawals can be set between 0.1–1 BTC.

You can also trigger a withdrawal manually, but in that case there is an additional fee of 0.5 mBTC.

How do I get started?

Go to https://strike.acinq.co, create an account, read the doc and receive your first payments!

We will be releasing a WooCommerce plugin shortly, and we are also looking at other options, such as Shopify.

Interested? Want to know more?

Contact us at strike@acinq.co.