Building LNbits — the WordPress for Your Bitcoin Lightning Node — With Ben

By Finance News On Sep 24, 2024

Company Name: LNbits

Founders: Ben Arc

Date Founded: Project: 2019 | Company: 2022

Location of Headquarters: Fully remote (most developers based in Europe)

Amount of Bitcoin Held in Treasury: N/A

Number of Employees: 6 (+ “a couple dozen other developers”)

Website: https://lnbits.com/

Public or Private? Private

Five years ago, Ben Arc first had the vision for LNbits — free and open-source software that works with any Lightning Network funding source and offers a suite of extensions for both personal and business use cases.

The vision for the project came to him in what he describes as a flash of inspiration.

“Christian Russo, the developer of the RaspiBlitz, had come down to visit and I remember sitting in a little wash cottage where he was staying, and I just sat on the sofa and I kept going, ‘LNbits, LNbits, LNbits,’” Arc told Bitcoin Magazine. “And then I was like, ‘I think I’m going to make this project where it can be set on top of any funding source and you’ll get this common API and then have some wallets and stuff.’”

Soon after, Arc, a Bitcoiner based in Wales, began working on the first LNbits project, a point of sale (PoS) extension for his friend Jörg Platzer, owner of the now defunct Berlin-based Bitcoin bar Room 77.

“We managed to get the PoS in the bar, and Jörg was amazed how well it worked,” recounted Arc.

“What he really wanted was like an accountancy layer from which you could export CSV and then import it into different wallets, so you could have different PoSs and they’d have different wallets. None of that stuff was possible in the node implementations at the time,” he added.

“So, we needed to build that for Jörg, and then I needed to build something so I didn’t have to keep replicating work when it came to creating different versions of projects.”

That something was LNbits.

The LNbits Developer Team Forms

In the years that followed, some of the brightest developers in the Bitcoin and Lightning space gravitated to LNbits, making contributions that would help put the project on the map.

These developers included Calle, creator of Cashu; fiatjaf, creator of Nostr; Pavol Rusnak, co-founder of Satoshi Labs and a host of other notable names and pseudonyms including but not limited to dni, Eneko, Vlad Stan, supertestnet and Black Coffee. (Arc also shared that the initial design for Nostr “partly came out of LNbits” and that Cashu “was an LNbits project for such a long time.”)

This makes the LNbits developer team the Wu-Tang Clan of Bitcoin and Lightning developers — an über-talented supergroup whose members do groundbreaking work both together and on their own.

And if the LNbits developer team is Wu-Tang, then Arc is the RZA, the head of the group who organizes things and helps set up business deals. That said, the LNbits team came together less because of a master plan by Arc and more out of practicality.

“LNbits came out of necessity because a lot of us were replicating work,” said Arc.

“A…