Here's an update from the Voltage team on the latest FOSS Friday.
What is FOSS Friday?
FOSS Friday is our bi-weekly innovation day at Voltage! On these days, our team dives into the exciting world of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). Why, you may ask? Well, Bitcoin and the Lightning network, the very core of our work, are open source technology.
As a bitcoin infrastructure company, we don't just use open source; we actively contribute to it. This is a symbiotic relationship for us: by contributing to these projects, we can do our part to bolster the bitcoin ecosystem while also uncovering fresh, innovative ideas.
What did we do?
Voltage Tipper
Austin worked more on the Voltage Tipper. This is a project to create an easy way to receive tips over Lightning which can be connected to a Lightning node on Voltage. From there, the Voltage tipper watches the node to check for paid invoices. It also uses LNURL to provide a Lightning address as a payment option.
This past Friday, he cleaned up some of the styling and focused on making it easier to deploy. The Readme file now has a Vercel deploy button. His thinking is that somebody with no developer experience should be able to click the button, deploy the Tipper to Vercel, and then paste in some credentials from their Voltage node in order to start receiving tips, all without writing any code.
Doppler
Doppler is a domain-specific language for Lightning that enables developers to easily experiment with and test against various Lightning implementations. Miller opened a PR to create a release workflow for Doppler. His PR uses cargo dist. Basically, you push a commit to master that contains a version string. This activates a Github workflow, which generates Mac and Linux binaries, and links them in a brand new release.
In other words, this PR makes preparing Doppler releases as easy as Doppler makes testing on the Lightning network.
Ghost Bitcoin
Brandon and Stephen paired on the initial planning for a Lightning integration with Ghost. Ghost is an alternative to platforms like WordPress and Substack. Brandon was seeking a way to create a Substack-like experience with a self-hosted Ghost instance, only using Bitcoin for payment instead of Stripe.
Together, they explored how Ghost integrations work, and sketched out different architectures for how an integration with a Lightning node would work. On the one hand, it would be ideal to integrate with a self-custodial Lightning node. On the other hand, this might be a burden to new Lightning users or someone who is already using a custodial Lightning provider. Ultimately, they settled on architecture that would abstract this into a Bitcoin payment process class, which could then be used to connect to different Lightning implementations and Lightning APIs. Taylor proposed building this as a NodeJS or Javascript package that could be integrated into more projects than just Ghost. Brandon and Stephen are preparing a document to share for feedback with the Ghost community.
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That’s all for this week!
