The Lightning Address

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Introduction

A massively simpler way for anyone to send you Bitcoin instantly on the Lightning Network.

The Lightning Address is a new internet identifier that enables anyone to send you Bitcoin instantly on the Lightning Network. It’s as easy as giving out your email address. Here’s some examples:

Lightning Address (lightningaddress.com)

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Common use cases

To learn more about the Lightning Address, visit lightningaddress.com.

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User to user payments

The Lightning Address enables frictionless user-to-user payments due to its human-readable nature. No longer are users sharing long strings of complex characters (e.g. lnbc1x0…). We’re now just a simple user@provider.com away! It’s super easy and intuitive.

Anyone can now send and receive instantly-settled global payments. It’s as easy as sending an email.

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Reward payouts

Many reward applications can also make use of a Lightning Addresses. Let’s say a user plays a game and earns some sats, then wants to claim their earned Bitcoin.

The game could ask the user to input their Lightning Address once, and it could let the payments fly automatically after a threshold has been met. Set it and forget it!

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Lightning money transfers

Lightning Address makes it really easy for users to transfer money between their different wallets. You should check out the ZBD App to see examples. A user can connect any Lightning Address to their ZBD app, enabling extremely easy transfers.

Moving money TO and FROM ZBD is a breeze because of UX capabilities and core integrations such as these.

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Payroll and payouts

Since a Lightning Address is a static address to receive payments to over the internet, it makes payroll and payouts very simple.

Have the user specify and confirm their Lightning Address destination where they would like their payment to be received. All paid instantly with near zero fees.

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Splits

Another incredible feature that comes with truly programmable money is that one can build Splits with Lightning Addresses. Let’s imagine a group of artists produced an album together, and are receiving payments for it through their Lightning Address. The artists could easily specify a percentage breakdown to pay for each of the bands’ members, and have those payments be split and settle on each of their wallets instantly.

That’s right! Someone purchases an album and upon receiving the successful payment, automatically fires off payments to each band member with their respective share, directly to their Lightning Address no matter which Bitcoin Lightning provider they are using.

True Internet Money.

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Deposits

Because Lightning Address are human-readable and leverage something users already know how to do (sending an email), it becomes very easy to enable deposits, payments, and withdrawals.

The user can be given their own Lightning Address, which makes it as easy giving out their email. For example, if a user wanted to receive money from another app or from payroll they’d just give them their Lightning Address.

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Payments

If they want to pay users, all they have to do is type in the recipient person’s Lightning Address, and the desired amount. It’s that easy.