I'm Nick Slaney CEO and Co-Founder of moneydevkit, AMA \ stacker news ~AMA

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I'm Nick Slaney CEO and Co-Founder of moneydevkit, AMA

hi stackers,

Last week my company, moneydevkit launched it's public beta. moneydevkit is a developer tool that lets anyone globally take payments using Bitcoin and lightning.

With so many more people being able to create value online recently, the boundaries of traditional payments are becoming more and more apparent. We're using self-custody lightning to give payments access to the 80% of the population that cannot use stripe. With this sort of use case in mind, our goal is to make moneydevkit as easy to use and integrate as possible.

Previously, I was at Block leading the c= team. The node my team built, now known simply as block is one of the largest volume nodes on the lightning network, and somewhat famously gave Block a 10% return on the Bitcoin we put into it :)

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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 21h

MDK is focused on the receiving use case, but do you imagine a future where you'll support sending use cases?

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @nps OP 21h

We spent a lot of time thinking through "Payouts" from mdk as having an easy way for us to let someone get money out of mdk using our dashboard while staying self-custodial was a bit of a puzzle :)

Exposing a send API for a more advanced users to use in their app actually shouldn't be too hard. It just wasn't our focus at first.

10 sats \ 2 replies \ @grayruby 22h

This is interesting. Full disclosure I am not a developer but I vibe coded a fantasy sports app to host sports contest for stackers here on SN and so far we are just testing some contests in it and essentially using it as an administrator to track picks, results etc. Eventually I want to enable lightning payments within the app. Do you think your project would be an easy way to do that?

309 sats \ 1 reply \ @nps OP 22h

Exactly the sort of thing we've set up mdk for. If you're on something like vercel / netlify, you'd be able to do it today, just ask your agent to add payments using moneydevkit. If you used Replit, we have something coming for you soon :)

Feel free to jump into our discord and ask questions if you need help working through it!

78 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 22h

Yes, I used replit.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xbitcoiner 22h

I get that you need to make money for your work and that some fee has to be charged. The question is: how did you decide that 2% per transaction was the fair amount?

22 sats \ 0 replies \ @nps OP 22h

Our main customers are not served well by traditional payments, and moreover are not super Bitcoiners into running their own nodes. Compared to the options these people realistically have access to, 2% is 50 - 70% off their next best option.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 22h

Is this something you see primarily being used by apps and webstores, or do expect to see people using moneydevkit as the backend for things like point of sale systems?

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @nps OP 22h

Our first use case is easy to add payments for AI assisted devs / vibe coders.

But the way we've packaged LDK, we can fit it into a lot of use cases. POS could be cool :)

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 22h

Hi Nick! I'm curious if moneydevkit could work with a woocommerce or shopify plugin. I've had a little webstore for a few years and lightning is always a struggle. A super simple plugin that doesn't make me struggle with a lightning node would be awesome!

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @nps OP 22h

Definitely something we want to look into 👀

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xbitcoiner 22h

Good job, congrats!

Could you explain better what the term ‘serverless’ actually means in practice?

135 sats \ 0 replies \ @nps OP 22h

It's funny because we've had a few devs in the Bitcoin community scoff at the term "serverless" :)

Serverless does not mean there are no servers! Mainly, it means that the developer doesn't have to think about the servers. The service provider handles it all for them, and typically they're also actively spinning up and down the functions a developer deploys on an on demand basis, which is very cheap for them.

Vercel and Netlify are the platforms we're thinking about when we're talking about serverless. They let you link your code via github and deploy for free very quickly, no setup or monthly fees. In the background they're spinning up and down your functions on demand.

With mdk, we've shoehorned LDK into a package that can deploy natively on these platforms. This means you get all the benefits of running a self-custodial lightning node without the cost / complexity of hosting one yourself. It's free to start and scales easily with your application.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 21h

What was the most surprising thing you learned leading c=?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nps OP 21h

The scale of real payments on the lightning network. It took us by surprise (in a good way).

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 21h

It seems like what most people want in terms of lightning UX is an onchain-like control of funds with varying degrees of trusted infra/channels/etc.

Do you agree with that?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nps OP 21h

I think people who know to search for lightning bitcoin payments right now have better concepts of on-chain than lightning.

But I think most people don't even know what on-chain is :)

I agree that most people just want payments to just work for them.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 21h

Is MDK competition for greenlight? Or am I thinking about this wrong?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nps OP 21h

There's some differences. Technically, with mdk the node and keys are on your infrastructure, not ours.

We spent a lot of time focusing on the developer experience for mdk. When a developer thinks "I want to add payments" the products they pick up are very full featured. They don't just get the credit card network send / receive API, they get a lot handled for them. To me this is the biggest difference, you don't need to know anything about Bitcoin to get a checkout page and get paid.

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @billytheked 22h

How does your current project differ from using a BTCPayserver with the Blink wallet integration, where the server is self hosted but lightning payments are received to an external (custodial) lightning wallet?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nps OP 22h

It's a little different!

Instead of needing to run / self-host, you can just include the moneydevkit library into your project and deploy from there. Most of our examples just have us asking the AI that's helping to build the website "hey add payments with moneydevkit"

moneydevkit is self-custodial, and the node / keys live on the same infrastructure your website is deployed to, but you don't need to really think about the node really. You can just treat it like another dependency to add to your web app.

With moneydevkit, you can easily pay out to Blink or any other wallet / exchange that supports LNURL or Bolt12.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @justin_shocknet 18h

this will get a few people to rush to their charts

serverless lightning node

This is a little red-flaggy / trustodial sounding, needs more explanation

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nps OP 1h

The node and keys are in your (serverless, typically) infrastructure and control. No trustody, it's all you.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 20h

What were you doing before joining Block? What made you want to start a company?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nps OP 1h

I'm a mechanical engineer by trade and did consumer product design for the first 10 years of my life. That's what brought me to Block, I helped with the Square Terminal, and did early prototyping for what became the handheld.

But I'm a class of 2013 Bitcoiner and alongside my product design career I was always running nodes, miners, and on Bitcoin twitter.

At Block, I managed to get on the early Bitkey team, and at the time was also going deep on lightning. While we were designing and building Bitkey prototypes I was pitching for c= within Block, and the rest is history.

I would call my time at Block my first founding story, because we started c= from scratch, albeit with a bit more funding and support than most startups.

My father was an entrepreneur, so let's say the suggestion to start a company was always there :)