It was in summer 2022, when Keyan, the founder of Stacker News and the Alby team talked about challenges of operating bitcoin apps and what we can do to help developers build more and better apps. That was the moment when Keyan mentioned that he would love to allow his users to send and receive bitcoin on Stacker News directly out of their own wallets. Back then users had to deposit funds first to tip other authors or withdraw them to their own wallet for two reasons: First, there was no easy and standardized way for wallet-app connections across platforms and second, lightning specific challenges with nodes behind tor or liquidity requirements would deteriorate the user experience too much.

Fast forward one and a half years Stacker News enabled self-custodial spending for their users leveraging NWC, an open standard to connect wallets to apps.

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