Wavespace, a Bitcoin neobank serving the Eurozone, has announced MiCA compliance of its ‘self-custodial’ debit card. The young fintech company is at the cutting edge of Bitcoin payments technology in Europe, with support for the Lightning Network, and auto DCA to self-custody. 

Debit cards in the Bitcoin and broader crypto industry have traditionally worked by preloading custodial accounts with bitcoin or stablecoins. The process of preloading was usually on-chain, taking time to settle and requiring manual input from the user to send from self-custody wallets or cold storage. If the preloaded balance ran out on the card, spending would not be possible. 

Wavespace’s self-custody debit card solves these problems with a novel Bitcoin technology called Nostr Wallet Connect, or NWC for short. This protocol, documented in NIP-47, allows users to connect a service like this debit card to a self-hosted Lightning node. The user sets a minimum balance, say $200 and every time the user spends from the card via the VISA network, Wavespace pulls sats from the user’s self-custodial wallet to top up the card. This process minimizes custodial exchange risk while maximizing user exposure to the asset and automating away the friction to spend bitcoin.

NWC is a technology developed by the Nostr ecosystem, a high-tech niche within the Bitcoin industry that is branching out into social media and other communication protocols.  

The Wavespace Neobank

As a high-tech neobank, Wavespace gives users a personal IBAN account, which they can send fiat to, to purchase Bitcoin. Their automated DCA services can be set to withdraw bitcoin upon purchase to a selected Bitcoin address. 

The company is MiCA compliant, making it one of the few surviving Bitcoin exchanges in Europe, as the complicated crypto regulations came online.

On the privacy front, the deep Lightning network integration of Wavespace lets user get access to the banking system in a clear and compliant manner, without exposing all their payment data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Since Lightning payments are off-chain, there is no single public record that leaks user data; instead, transactions move through payment channels between various user services, leaving no obvious public trace. The result is a growing compromise between the high privacy, cypherpunk values that created the Bitcoin and crypto industry, while also unlocking access to the legacy financial system, and compliant integration with regulation-heavy areas like Europe. 

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Eivydas Račkauskas, Chief Orange Pill Giver at Wavespace, said that 70% of the payments made on the platform use the Lightning Network and that the company is looking into the ARK protocol for further self-custody-oriented payments integrations. He also revealed that the company is integrated with Lightspark and is ready for an expansion into the USA, though he did not reveal further details on the…

Today, Spark has announced a new integration with Wallet of Satoshi, one of the largest Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) wallets, to bring users a “truly self-custodial Lightning experience,” in beta, according to a press release sent to Bitcoin Magazine.

“From the start, Spark felt like the missing piece,” stated Wallet of Satoshi. “It gave us the foundation to explore self-custody seriously – abstracting away the complex parts of self-custody so we could stay focused on user experience.”

Being self-custodial, this will allow customers to have full control over their Bitcoin. In November 2024, Wallet of Satoshi removed its app from the U.S. Apple and Google app stores because of unspecified reasons, although likely due to an unfavorable regulatory environment cracking down on Lightning wallets at the time. But now that the regulatory landscape has changed in the U.S., Wallet of Satoshi stated this integration will unlock the ability to re-enter and serve the U.S. market. 

Wallet of Satoshi also faced limitations when developing its self-custodial Lightning wallet, such as liquidity requirements, node complexity, and channel management costs, making it difficult to build a truly self-custodial LN wallet — but now, Spark has provided them a solution.

“We built Spark specifically to solve this exact problem,” the company stated. “Spark abstracts away all the complexity for wallets looking to implement Lightning. You don’t need to spin up channels, worry about routing, pre-fund liquidity, or even think about managing nodes. Creating a Lightning wallet on Spark takes just 6 lines of code.”

Spark stated that it will continue building out new features as the product evolves, and those interested in joining the beta can leave a comment on their X post requesting to join.

On May 22, Breez and Spark partnered to launch a new implementation of the Breez SDK, built on Spark’s Bitcoin-native Layer 2 infrastructure. The SDK supports LNURL, Lightning addresses, real-time mobile notifications, and includes bindings for all major programming languages and frameworks. The collaboration gave developers tools to add Bitcoin payment features to apps used for monetization social apps, cross-border remittances, and in-game currencies.

A day earlier, Spark also partnered with Magic Eden to improve Bitcoin trading by addressing issues like slow transaction times, high fees, and poor user experience. The integration introduced a native settlement system aimed at making transactions faster and more cost-effective, without using bridges or synthetic assets.