Repost from Breez's Medium.

Technology and money are always in motion. Today’s technologies are just tools to build those of tomorrow, and money is also called currency because it has to flow. Stasis is anathema.

The opposite of stasis isn’t exactly motion. A tap dancer can move a lot without going anywhere. No, the opposite of stasis is more like momentum. Momentum is motion with two very important qualities: mass (the stuff that’s moving) and velocity (how fast it’s going and where).

Momentum is a word that has come up a lot in our recent discussions about what Breez has done and what we have planned. This couldn’t be more appropriate, since we’re combining two things that require constant motion, and we’re adding mass and velocity.

Mass and velocity. (Effort and teamwork help too!) (Image: Indira Tjokorda)

Velocity combines speed and direction, and our direction is clear. We’re expanding access to borderless, trustless, permissionless, self-custodied money and peer-to-peer payments. Not only will this enhance freedom for all of us from the centibillionaires to the unbanked, it is facilitating entirely new business models and economic relations that outdated, intermediated, centralized fiat payments prohibit. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of history is long, but it bends toward freedom. That is our direction.

If liberating people and their money through technology is our direction, then the Breez SDK is our vehicle. Leveraging Lightning and compatible technologies, the Breez SDK lets developers add those borderless, trustless, permissionless, self-custodied, peer-to-peer payments to any app anywhere on the planet.

The mass of Breez depends on two quantities. The first is the scope and utility of features in the Breez SDK. The more developers can do with the SDK, the more attractive it becomes as a way to add peer-to-peer payments to their apps. The second is the range and reach of the partners who’ve integrated the SDK. The more partners opt for our payment solution, the more we learn about how to adapt it to different contexts, different problems, and different user groups.

Both of these quantities have grown in the last year. We’ve improved the SDK through a number of new features, which have compelled many new partners to give us a try.

Over 40 apps have already implemented our SDK in production or beta since we launched it less than 18 months ago. Collectively, ~1.5 million users now have access to self-custodial, peer-to-peer bitcoin payments through these apps. Our partners include household names in bitcoinland and crypto country as well as dynamic up-and-comers: Relai, Cake Wallet, Klever, Yopaki, Elysium Lab, and many more. These apps processed over $4.5 million in gross transaction volume in 2024.

We’ve been working on our vehicle, the Breez SDK, to continuously improve its power and acceleration. The original, native implementation of the SDK gives users their own remote Lightning nodes that they can access anywhere on any device, and it lets developers integrate Lightning payments to their apps within just a few days and with a few API calls. Because of these strengths, it’s a great choice for many applications.

More recently, we launched the nodeless implementation of the SDK. In effect, it delivers the same seamless, virtually instantaneous bitcoin payments as the native implementation. However, by obviating channel management and a lot of the liquidity considerations that have long held Lightning back, the nodeless implementation accomplishes its task with less backend complexity and no setup fees for end-users. With the simplest UX Lightning can provide at the moment, it’s also a great choice for many other applications.

In the two quarters since we launched the nodeless implementation, adoption has been almost overwhelming. Over half the users the Breez SDK has reached have access to Lightning through our nodeless version.

Unlike some more esoteric kinds of creativity, software development like ours allows for relatively quantifiable measures of progress. A painter would never count their brushstrokes, but we count our commits exactly (actually, GitHub counts them automatically for us).

The nodeless implementation, which went live only months ago, has seen 572 commits over 10 releases since the launch. The native implementation has been active too, with 662 commits over 25 releases.

Hey devs! Listen to Neil Young: rust never sleeps.

Momentum is great so long as you’re on the right track. It helps to check your bearings every so often to confirm the course. To that end, we’d like to share a few exciting projects on our roadmap.

Developers can look forward to Breez supporting new Lightning standards, including BOLT 12, to bring bitcoin payments directly to browsers through WebAssembly and improving the multi-device, multi-app support of the SDK with a real-time synchronization service.

Breez is also preparing to launch Misty Breez, a new reference app built on the nodeless implementation, showcasing how easy the Lightning UX can be for end-users using our SDK. In addition to these initiatives, we’re exploring new technologies to further enhance the SDK and set new standards for peer-to-peer payments.

We’re making great progress, and if anything, we want to accelerate. So it’s time to push that little red button, the one that releases the N20 and makes everything in the rearview mirror distant and blurry.

In our case, the nitrous comes in the form of investors who inject the wisdom and capital that let us pick the right moves and execute them. They’ve recognized our product-market fit and our ability to continue driving adoption of Lightning in crypto, fintech, and mainstream apps.

Yes, Breez just raised $5 million. The list of our supporters includes some old friends, like Entrée Capital and ego death capital (still the best name for a VC firm there ever was or will be), along with some new ones, like Plan ₿ Fund and Timechain.

Jeff Booth, general partner at ego death capital, added: “Breez is breaking down barriers and providing the tools needed to build a world powered by permissionless peer-to-peer payments. Their work has been essential to manifest bitcoin’s importance as a medium of exchange, and we’re excited to continue to support them on this journey.”

We’ve been working really hard lately, and it’s gratifying to see smart, like-minded people agree that our momentum is so strong. We couldn’t do it alone, and we haven’t, so we’d like to thank everyone who has helped us build new things and the users who give our effort meaning. You are our growth and our strength.