Lightning Stream 0.2.0 · Umbrel, StartOS, Linux
Pay as it arrives.
Buy and sell services over XBT Lightning, paid as you use them: a seller's web app or files by the megabyte, an AI model by the token, hashrate by the slice of work, a VPN exit by the gigabyte. No accounts. No custody.
Lightning made payments fast. Stream tickets make them continuous.
Pay a small ticket as the service starts. The seller draws it down, exactly, as it delivers, and signs a receipt for every answer. The next ticket is paid before the credit runs out.
01 Tickets
A buyer pays a shop, a ticket at a time.
A ticket is an ordinary Lightning payment of about 900 sat. The seller counts what it delivers to the millisatoshi and signs a receipt for every answer. A held ticket that is never used comes back, and credit left over is spent first the next time.
- Paid from your own node, within spending rules you sign.
- No request waits for a payment: the next ticket is ready in the background.
- Lightning's own routing, channels and nodes carry the money. Stream adds no new kind of channel.
02 Web apps and files
Your web apps and files, sold by the megabyte.
Sell a whole web app, for example Jellyfin with its full interface and films up to 4K, opened inside the buyer's app with an account made for each buyer. Or share a folder: buyers download a file or open it in their own player, and pay per GB as it arrives.
- Video priced per MiB, pages per request, files per GB.
- A file is never paid past the size its listing shows.
- A 4K film started within about 1.5 s of the same film with no Stream in the path.
03 AI
AI models, paid by the token.
Your box gets an OpenAI-compatible address on your own network. Any AI app or agent that speaks that API uses the models of the sellers you allowed, paid per token as the answer arrives, each program with its own key and limit.
- It picks the cheapest seller that answers, and moves on if one fails before answering.
- A reply is never paid past its quoted price.
- Agents pay through the same wallet over MCP, and never hold a key.
04 Hashrate
Hashrate, rented with masked jobs.
A hashmaker lists its miners; a hashtaker rents them into its own gateway, the Stream Gateway that comes with the app. Every job is masked with a key the gateway holds, so a rented miner can't tell which share is a block and can't withhold one.
- Both sides check every share's proof of work.
- Paid as the work arrives, seconds at a time: never more paid for and not yet received than a minute of the miner's hashing (or one share, one slice and one ticket, if that is more), plus any start fee shown on the offer.
- Mine solo to your own address, or pool mining on Lazarus Pool.
05 VPN exits
A VPN exit, paid by the gigabyte.
Send a phone's, a laptop's or a whole home's traffic out through another Stream user's internet connection, in the country you choose, with no account. An exit's country is checked, not believed.
- If no exit fits a device's rules, its traffic stops. It never falls back to your own connection.
- Private exits are the default: your app resolves names over encrypted DNS, so the exit never sees a DNS question.
- A tunnel pays about one and a half tickets ahead at most.
06 Links and relays
No domain. No port forward.
A shop is named by its key. Buyers reach it over an encrypted link, straight through both home routers where they can. Where they can't, a relay carries the traffic without being able to read it. In private mode a shop uses relays only, so buyers never learn its address.
- Shops publish signed listings on Nostr, so buyers find them without a directory.
- A relay is built into the app, off by default, and free.
- Paid relays, where a shop pays the relays it uses by the GB: Coming
Protections
What a shop can, and can't, take.
A buyer can lose only a small, stated amount to a seller that cheats, and that seller is then blocked. The exact bound is written down in the design notes.
Never more than the listing
The price in a shop's signed listing is the most your wallet pays it, for web apps, files, AI, hashrate and VPN exits. A shop that asks more is refused before anything is paid.
A cheat is caught and blocked
A dishonest shop can keep at most a ticket or two for each answer it is sending, plus a small allowance per request. One that charges past that is blocked until you lift the block with your approval key.
Rules you sign
Budgets, caps per shop, allowed sellers only, and an approval above a threshold. The safe starter rules allow 2,000 sat a payment, 10,000 a day and 30,000 a week, and ask you above 1,000.
No custody
Lightning Stream never holds anyone's money. Each person pays from, and is paid to, their own node. The links and the relays never carry money.
Real money only when asked
On mainnet the wallet pays nothing until you confirm, in so many words, that it may pay with real money.
Its own books
It counts what your own node paid, routing fees included, never a number a seller sends. A cap is a hard cap. Each shop also has a daily cap.
On XBT mainnet
Counted to the millisatoshi.
A round with real sats on 30 and 31 October 2026, between our own nodes, before the 0.2.0 release.
paid by a buyer of ours to the demo shop, Lightning Stream Genesis, in four tickets: files, its web app over a direct link and over a relay, and AI answers. Both nodes and the wallet's books agreed to the millisatoshi.
accepted, none rejected, in a 15-minute hashrate rental that paid 1,000 sat for 25 slices.
through a paid VPN exit. The round found two faults in paying, an exit that charged too little and a test slice that ran unpaid; both are fixed in 0.2.0.
Nobody outside the project has used it yet. Tests and numbers has every figure.
Live
The network, as it is now.
Shops publish signed listings on Nostr relays. This site reads them, and a snapshot of the public XBT Lightning channel graph, and shows both.
Install
Runs on the node you already have.
You need a synced Knots-BLAKE2b node, Lightning Fork beside it, and a small channel on XBT Lightning. One app buys, sells and rents hashrate.
Community app store
Add the Lightning Stream store and install. The app makes its own narrow keys on your node: nothing to paste.
Install on Umbrel → STARTOSIts own registry
Add the registry, install, then approve Lightning Fork's Grant app access task. The key can pay and read, nothing more.
Install on StartOS → LINUXDocker Compose
Beside your own Knots and Lightning Fork, from the same images, pinned by digest. For x86_64, arm64 and armv7.
Install on Linux →Coming next
Not built yet, in this order.
None of these is released. Each ships when it is built and checked.
Paid relays
A shop pays the relays that carry its traffic, by the GB. Relays stay free until then.
Nostr Wallet Connect
Buying from a wallet you control, instead of a Lightning node of your own.
AI sellers on Nostr
Data vending machines (NIP-90), as another source for your box's AI address.
Blossom media
Media on a Blossom server, sold per MiB through a Stream gateway in front of it.
Progress and status has the later ideas too.
Try it on your own node.
Install the app, sign the safe starter rules, confirm that it may pay with real money, and allow a seller. Our demo shop, Lightning Stream Genesis, sells films, files and a small AI model. Paste its key under Services → Sellers:
npub1kqdrfmfg6mg52sy3ehu4vv7m3fjpa0830rhjdmvqrf09u3t3724q8cwr6aSmall amounts only. Lightning Stream is early software. It has had design and code reviews, not an independent audit, and software can have faults. Put in only what you can afford to lose.
LIMITS.md lists every stated limit, and what nobody has reviewed.