Before I even arrived at this year’s Africa Bitcoin Conference, I saw attendees posting about Tando, a new Kenya-based payments app that allows users to spend their sats with merchants who don’t accept bitcoin.

Just arrived in Nairobi 🇰🇪🛬 & the 1st thing I see as I exit is the @tando_me sign

LET’S GO @AfroBitcoinOrg 🙌🏾 pic.twitter.com/zhPSP2dTH8

— OKIN | Nikolai Tjongarero (@OKIN_17) December 8, 2024

“How is this possible?”, you might ask. Well, let me explain.

To use Tando, you simply download the app and prepare to pay any merchant who accepts payments via M-PESA, Kenya’s mobile money service. (Notice I didn’t say you had to go through a set up or KYC process, as neither are necessary — Tando doesn’t collect any identifying information from its users.)

When the merchant presents you with your bill, you simply click on the “Send Money” square on the app’s home screen. From there, you enter the mobile number tied to the M-PESA account to which you’re sending money and then input the amount of Kenyan shillings you want to send.

The app automatically calculates the amount of sats it will take to cover the shilling amount you’ve input. You then click on the green “Create Invoice” button to obtain a Lightning invoice. After that, you copy the invoice and pay it via your preferred Lightning wallet. Tando receives the sats and then settles the bill in shillings with the merchant within seconds.

I can barely count how many times I’ve watched Bitcoiners use Tando to pay restaurant bills or taxi fares since I’ve been here. (I’ve been to a lot of restaurants and have ridden in a lot of taxis since I’ve arrived.)

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: Tando interfaces with a fiat payment system, which means it should be excommunicated from the Church of Bitcoin.

But before you allow yourself to entertain that kind of thinking, please consider the following notions:

1. You’re a loser.
2. Here in Kenya, much like in other parts of Africa, people actually use bitcoin for payments.
3. When you show someone how to use Tando, it provides you with an opportunity to show the merchant what Bitcoin is as you show them how the app works. (I watched Gorilla Sats’ Brindon Mwiine masterfully do this for a waitress at a conference after party.)
4. M-PESA requires that its users KYC and some Kenyan citizens don’t have the proper documentation to do so, which means they’re excluded from the system. Using Tando, they can be included in Kenya’s broader monetary system.

The excitement around Tando at the conference was part of the broader enthusiasm around apps that make bitcoin easier to use across the African continent — apps like Bitsacco, Machankura, Fedi and Bitnob.

Massive shout out to the devs making #Bitcoin wallets easier to use.@bitsacco @Machankura8333 @fedibtc @tando_me @Loicbtc pic.twitter.com/UhVw5bnBxO

— Frank Corva (@frankcorva) December 11, 2024

African Bitcoiners are far ahead of their counterparts in the United States when it comes to using bitcoin as it is intended to be used — as peer-to-peer electronic cash.

And while many Africans are working tirelessly to onboard as many merchants as they can to Bitcoin, Tando is an excellent intermediary step that allows Bitcoiners to spend their sats even if the merchants with whom they’re spending don’t yet accept bitcoin payments.

On Tuesday, Breez announced its latest partner, Yopaki, a Mexican neobank. Yopaki has integrated with Breez’s free and open-source SDK, which enables its users to have a non-custodial Lightning wallet without having to run their own Lightning node. (More on how this works here.)

Before continuing, I have to say that I get a little bit jealous whenever Breez makes such announcements, because they make me wish that Breez could partner with neobanks or Bitcoin apps accessible to residents in New York State, like myself.

The thing is though, we can’t have nice Lightning things here in the Empire State because regulation in New York — a state that seems to almost pride itself on its soul-crushing levels of red tape and bureaucracy — prohibits companies from offering Lightning services.

But anyway, where was I?

⚡️Welcoming Yopaki to (Nodeless) Lightning ⚡️

We're thrilled to announce @yopaki_ as our latest SDK partner. The bitcoin neobank is reimagining banking while sharing 🇲🇽 culture with the world.

Powered by Breez SDK – Nodeless (@Liquid_BTC) 🚀

👇👇👇https://t.co/zJVq6X1EVZ

— Breez ⚡ (@Breez_Tech) November 12, 2024

In the Bitcoin space, we frequently hear about the challenges Bitcoin faces in scaling and how Lightning isn’t a sufficient solution. Oddly enough, though, we never hear this complaint from Roy Sheinfeld, co-founder and CEO of Breez, because he’s too busy building things that prove the Lightning naysayers wrong.

Sheinfeld and the team at Breez, who are on a mission to bring Lightning to every app, have been on a hot streak when it comes to helping Lightning users around the world gain access to non-custodial Lightning services. Earlier this year, they announced partnerships with Volt in Nigeria and Diamond Hands in Japan.

We're excited to announce the beta release of Diamond Wallet, a self-custodial Lightning wallet that enables users to earn sats by viewing ads.

It's also the first self-custodial wallet from Japan, built using the Breez SDK and its Greenlight implementation.

Demo video↓ pic.twitter.com/kpsgfh3RGZ

— Diamond Hands💎🙌 (@DiamondHandsLN) October 1, 2024

Sometimes, when I’m alone, I look up at the sky and say to myself, “Why, God, why do Nigerians, the Japanese and Mexicans get access to such sweet monetary tech while my once great state — home to a city that refers to itself as the ‘financial capital of the world,’ but ironically doesn’t allow its residents to use cutting edge Lightning services — fades into obscurity?”

While I never get an answer, I do take comfort in the fact that the likes of Sheinfeld and the team at Breez are out there ensuring that nodeless non-custodial Lightning wallets are proliferating, enabling people to more easily use bitcoin as it was intended to be used — peer-to-peer.

I look forward to seeing Breez partner with even more apps and neobanks in 2025.

This article is a Take. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

David Marcus is taking his experience as the former head of PayPal and Meta Messenger and applying it to building on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.

At Lightspark’s first partner summit, Lightspark Sync, he and his team rolled out new capabilities for the Universal Money Address (UMA) standard it launched one year ago. These new features will make it easier to tip, pay for subscriptions and invoice over Lightning (and in conjunction with banks in some cases).

At the summit, Lightspark also unveiled a new Bitcoin L2 it has built — Spark — which is interoperable with Lightning and which enables users to use bitcoin (and stablecoins) non-custodially.

I sat down with Marcus the day before Lightspark Sync to learn more about what drives him. We also discussed his strategy in harnessing the power of Bitcoin as a neutral global settlement layer, while still meeting everyday users where they’re at regarding what type of money they like to use.

A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows below.

Frank Corva: I recently saw you post on Twitter that you were happy to be sick on a weekend versus on a weekday because you’re so excited about what you’re working on here at Lightspark. What about this work makes you so excited?

David Marcus: Well, the general idea of changing the way money moves around the world is something that I’ve been obsessed with for a very long time. The fact that we can really change this for potentially billions of people in a profound way is a once in a generation opportunity that I get to actually work on with an amazing team. It’s exciting when you start making progress and when you start to see product market fit.

Corva: Some members of the Lightspark team just showed me the new capabilities of the Universal Money Addresses (UMA) as well as Lightspark’s new Bitcoin L2, Spark. You’re catering to both everyday people who want to move money globally and Bitcoin enthusiasts who care about self-custody. Is the strategy to just get as many people using your products as possible?

Marcus: Just to backtrack a little bit — I don’t need to convince you, but once you get the conviction that Bitcoin is the only thing that can actually be the internet of money because it’s the only asset and network that’s neutral enough to be that, then you have to wonder: Why hasn’t it already won?

If you go back and peel the onion, you start to see, first of all, bitcoin wasn’t moving all that quickly or cheaply. That’s where the Lightning Network came in. The problem with the Lightning Network, while it’s been around for a while, was that it was really hard to implement, really hard to operate and really hard to maintain. And it wasn’t super reliable for transactions.

So, we invested a good chunk of the two plus years of our existence into really making an enterprise grade entry point into Lightning for institutional players, banks and exchanges. That really changed the game, because a lot of them were looking at the lack of activity on the Lightning Network and at the complexity of getting on the Lightning Network and then it became a self-fulfilling prophecy: there’s no activity, it’s too hard, I’m not going to do it

Corva: I’ve heard those complaints before.

Marcus: We broke that cycle by launching Lightspark Connect. That was the foundation, because if you can’t make what I call TCP/IP packets for money — fragments of bitcoin on Lightning — work really well, then you can’t do anything. That was priority number one.

Then we realized we need to enable people to move the currencies they use for their everyday goods and services on the network. That’s when we launched UMA, which is this Universal Money Address standard built on top of LNURL, and extended it so that regulated entities can not only be compliant but can also change in and out of bitcoin and get a quote from the counterparty they’re sending to for the desired currency of the recipient.

That was starting to really work, but then we realized, “Okay, we need to reach [people on] the network that are going to implement UMA natively across the world, but network effects are going to take forever.” That’s where Extend comes in. It makes Bitcoin, Lightning, and UMA compatible with the legacy payment and banking rails, which is really critical.

That’s now launching, and we’re seeing really promising traction with making the entire banking sector basically compatible with Lightning. People have the ability to send and receive money in real time 24/7, no bank holidays, no weekends, nothing.

Then we realized that institutions are building on top of UMA and are offering the ability for their customers — whether they’re consumers or businesses — to claim an UMA address, which is good for peer-to-peer payments, but there’s so much more that we can do. That’s where UMA Request and UMA Auth come in.

Corva: From what I’ve learned thus far, these seem like they will be quite important for merchants.

Marcus: With UMA Request, whether you’re a business or an e-commerce site, you can request money from a wallet [that holds] another currency, and have the transaction settled on Lightning. Then there’s UMA Auth, which is OAuth for money. It’s basically the ability for wallet holders or account holders that are UMA-enabled to delegate push and pull of funds with user set limits. If you make the credit card comparison, you can give your credit card for a subscription, but you don’t set the limit.

So now, if you look at where we are: We basically made Lightning the thing that moves bitcoin fast and cheap — really easy to integrate, maintain, and operate. We figured out a way to move fiat currencies on top of the network in a seamless way. We extended the network to make it compatible with the old banking rails. But what’s missing for Bitcoin now to win fully and entirely and become the true open standard for moving money on the internet? I think there are two things that are holding it back.

One is self custody wallet support. If the network is a closed network and only works between custodial entities, we don’t want that. We want this thing to be as open as possible. Also, for developers, if you need to ask someone for permission to develop something, to test something, to build something, then it’s not like the internet — it’s like CompuServe or AOL.

Support for fast and cheap self-custody wallets on Bitcoin is something that we tried to figure out with Lightning, and it’s basically impossible. I mean, it’s possible but economically non-viable to park that amount of liquidity in front of every self-custody wallet for an eventual future transaction. Then, there are a bunch of different things that we explored with LSPs. They are either non-compliant or have a lot of other issues around how they move money.

The second thing was stablecoins, which are basically a version of a US-dollar denominated bank account for people who can’t have the real thing. As they grow in popularity and usage, if we can’t make them travel natively on Bitcoin, then we’re at a disadvantage. And so that’s why we built Spark, which is what we see as a totally non-linear jump forward for Bitcoin that will enable self-custody wallets to interoperate fully with Lightning.

It really extends the reach of self-custody to Lightning. It makes stablecoins a reality on Bitcoin, which they couldn’t be as well on Lightning, because, if you look at Taproot Assets and [other protocols like it], they’re pretty good on top of Lightning, but then you go back to the problem of pairwise channels for each of those stablecoins. In a world where you’re going to have thousands of stablecoins, it’s just not going to work.

We believe Spark solves the last two problems standing in a way of Bitcoin becoming the internet of money.

Corva: UMA Auth enables people to make payments within other apps. Was it challenging to build something that accomplishes this, something that makes payments and tipping not only possible but easy?

Marcus: There are several things here to unpack. First of all, making Lightning work really well for regulated entities was really hard. Once you’ve done that, you need to build something that enables them to move the money that people want to use and do it in a way in which regulated entities can meet their compliance requirements. That’s something that’s non-trivial.

Then, the Extend piece is actually understanding how payment systems work and really doing the work — which is a lot of work — to make the network compatible with existing payment rails.

So, A, it’s a lot of work. B, it’s a lot of understanding of not just how Bitcoin and Lightning work, but also how traditional payments globally work, what the regulatory landscape looks like, and what people, what companies and regulated institutions actually need to trust the network that they’re going to connect to and offer to their customers.

Corva: Do banks see the benefits in using Lightning as a settlement layer? In some ways, it seems like with what you’ve built, there would be no need for CBDCs, which would help keep smaller banks in business, because it isn’t a given that CBDCs will be able to be used for international remittances.

Marcus: Some banks do, and some others will eventually, but they’ll take a little more time.

At the end of the day, if you build a more efficient network that enables global money movement faster, cheaper, in real time 24/7 and with no blackout dates, then that’s where money is going to flow and the financial system and the ecosystem players are just going to need to adapt to that.

If you’re a bank you’re going to be able to offer global payments to your clients at a cheaper rate and have a margin on top of that, which you know is going to be very comfortable if you’re competing with the current alternatives — international wire transfers are still forty five to fifty dollars.

Corva: You’re working with Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) and the team from Alby. It seems like you really have your ear to the ground regarding new technologies coming to market in the Bitcoin, Lightning and Nostr spaces.

Marcus: Absolutely. With Nostr Wallet Connect, there’s actually a really good solution to the problem of delegating Auth, or delegating the ability to push and pull from a wallet with a protocol, that is starting to have nascent network effects in the Bitcoin and Nostr communities.

It’s really good work, and so why not extend it and enable more things to happen with Nostr Wallet Connect for mainstream use cases? That’s the way we look at things. We look at what the entire community is building, we contribute to those efforts, and then we try to extend it to bring it to mainstream consumers so they can use it in a way that is going to be familiar and not foreign to them.

Corva: Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share?

Marcus: We’re really excited. We feel like all of these capabilities that we’ve been hard at work on in are almost two and a half years of existence are reaching a tipping point right now where basically there are all of the capabilities that are required for Bitcoin to decisively win at becoming the open internet for money, and now it’s just a matter of executing, of finding all of the entities that are going to not only share that vision but execute it with us.

That’s why — to your point about me not wanting to be sick on a work day — I feel like this is just too exciting to not work on every day.