Bring Your Own Lightning Address
Starting today, Wavlake artists will be able to use their own Lightning Address to receive earnings from fans. By logging into Studio and setting this preference, artists can now automatically receive earnings to any personal Lightning account that uses a Lightning Address for receiving payments.
For anyone who is not familiar, a Lightning Address is an identifier that looks exactly like an email address (for example, wally@example.com). But the magical thing about this address is you can receive bitcoin with it over a standard protocol known as LNURL that most Lightning services support.
There are a few reasons we're making this feature available.
The first is we've upgraded our payment backend to a new Lightning service provider so we can handle payments for users more reliably and consistently as we scale. However, this service comes with some new region restrictions for regulatory reasons. So we created an option for users in affected regions as well as any users who simply wish to use their own wallet for earnings.
The second is convenience – it removes the need to ever think about manually withdrawing sats from your Wavlake wallet. This also makes our service less custodial. Since we will be forwarding payments directly to an artist's personal Lightning account, we minimize the time earnings are held in our custody.
Why not both?
You may want to keep using the built-in Wavlake wallet for the ease of sending zaps to other artists, and also activate your own Lightning Address for receiving earnings. This is also an option for users in supported regions.
We understand not everyone will have access to our new Wavlake wallet, but we hope to expand this support over time. For now, we're encouraged with the many options out there that will work seamlessly with Wavlake, thanks to the standard protocols of the Lightning Network.
For more information on this update, visit our info page.
In case you don't have a Lightning Address, here are some providers out there who can help: