Announcing MinatoPay.com

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Minatopay.com is a rest API that allows you to accept lightning payments easily and quickly. We support your privacy and don't ask to see your ID.

Getting Started

You can get started by creating an account at app.minatopay.com/register and getting your API Keys.

Documentation

You can see our documentation here, we conveniently share a postman collection where you just have to add your API key to the environment variable, and you have access immediately. You can literally make your first API call in 2 minutes or less if you've used a Postman API collection before.

How can I trust you?

This is something we thought about for a while and and also discussed with the stacker.news community. We came up with the following solution:
As soon as we process a payment, it's available for withdrawal immediately, and for free (we pay the routing fees out of pocket). We prefer we don't hold onto your sats. Currently we support withdrawals of any size to Wallet Of Satoshi . Very small withdrawals elsewhere might currently not work due to the prohibitively large fees, but improving our capacity and connectivity is one of our top priorities currently, so that limitation is temporary. If you would like to make withdrawals somewhere and are not able to, you can let us know where you would like to withdraw to, and we can open channels there.

Our Feature Road Map

  • Improve our nodes capacity & connectivity greatly over the next few days (both inbound and outbound)
  • Optimize the prebuilt hosted checkout page, and allow you to customize it by adding your company/merchant name & logo
  • Add support for LNURL Withdrawals
  • Add automatic withdrawal option
  • Add fiat to sat conversion, so you can specify a fiat amount you would like to charge, and it will automatically be converted to a sat invoice.
  • Add some front end reporting such as seeing all your payment & withdrawal history in a table, seeing revenue graphs, etc.
  • Adding different permission levels for API keys
  • plugins for sites like wordpress and shopify

Longer Term Road Map

  • The direction we are most excited about implementing is a non-custodial solution for MinatoPay.com.

SAT GIVEAWAYS

This is just for fun and the amount is small so please don't take the giveaway too seriously.

Give away #1

10k sats for the first person to guess the inspiration behind the name/branding.

Give away #2

10k sats for the most insightful/helpful comment
I'd be interested to see you allowing inbound bitcoin payments (with no distinct between bitcoin/lightning funds thereafter). Also withdrawal to a lightning address.
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See also another post, found here on SN, sharing the news about a feature released:
Feature Release: Instant Withdrawals #122437
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on the website in the plug and play section is a typo:
we're up and running
it should be: ...were up and runnning
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Helpful comment? Ok, here we go: Please, please use the SVG image format instead of a PNG image for the Minato logo on your website. For more sharpness on high-resolution displays.
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good luck, and thanks for keeping us in the loop. I'd love to hear more about why small withdrawals elsewhere don't work. Where do those fees come from? I don't know too much about the lightning network, so pardon my lay-man question.
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It's because my lightning node doesn't have a channel with outbound capacity to other wallets yet. This means that a payment to those wallets will have to be routed through other nodes, which take fees along the way.
For example, a 1k sat payment to another wallet can easily cost greater than 5%. Larger payments usually have a smaller % fee due to costs being made up of a base fee and a fixed %.
But as I connect to more nodes and build greater capacity, this problem should go away soon.
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Congrats for the launch!
I registered and tried, it works fine.
However, 2% transaction fee is still high. It's not attractive compared to open node or other services.
The admin dashboard need more improvements, I even can't see my balance..
Right now I am using Lnbits (online version) for MVP, it works great.
Hope you can convert me soon!
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Not sure if you noticed btw but we decided to drop our fees to 1% a while ago.
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Glad to hear it worked fine.
Yes the admin dashboard is very minimal at the moment, but that will be improved soon. You can see your account balance with a GET request to https://api.minatopay.com/v1/account/balance/
Can you tell me about what would be required to convert you features wise?
With transaction fee %, this is something we're experimenting with. It may be that for some merchants, the privacy aspect is well worth the 1% difference, but this requires some market research.
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