It was a good week. Plenty of cool things are happening at Voltage right now, but we’ll share more on that some other time. We had a great Bitcoin Socratic Seminar 36 at ATLBitLab on Wednesday night. Jordan and I dropped another episode of the Sovereign Computing Show about phone numbers (buying them with bitcoin, among many other things).
Top Builder
Round 2 of TopBuilder is nearing it’s close. For the past few months, I’ve been serving as a UX mentor for the projects in this competition.
You can check out the talk I did for the Builders here, called “Bitcoin UX for the Streets”. I wanted to focus my presentation on how to quickly make progress with improving your UX by talking directly to users, especially when you are working on a small team and don’t have a designer. There’s a lot about UX that has nothing to do with aesthetics, and sometimes these details can be distracting when you’re trying to rapidly ship prototypes and proofs-of-concept.
I’ve had mentor conversations this week with CozyBot, Sats.GG, and Blockstamp. It’s cool stuff the teams are producing! It’s been great seeing everyone’s progress in the program over the past 2 months.
BOLT 12
I updated the bolt12.org website with some new projects: Lightspark, Breez SDK, and CoinOS. Great to see more projects adopting BOLT 12!
TwelveCash & Aurora
Courtesy of Bitshala and Bitcoin Design Foundation, the talented designer Deeksha Satapathy has been working on TwelveCash and Aurora, two separate but related projects.
TwelveCash
TwelveCash is an API (and frontend UI) for making bitcoin “usernames”, or in other words, BIP-353 identifiers. (Anybody got suggestions on what we call these things?)
Deeksha has been designing some really cool looking templates for the OpenGraph images that will display if you share a link to somebody’s username on social media.
I worked on writing frontend code for this. I have the basic skeleton there:
These images will be dynamically generated by NextJS (website framework). In the above example I am feeding in a super long abomination of my last night to test out what happens when long strings are passed in. I am defining rules to shrink the font size when strings exceed certain limits. Deeksha has also created a library of images and slogans. In my next work on this PR, I will take a username and deterministically select an image and slogan to use in the OG meta image.
Aurora
Aurora is a lightning prism manager for content creators. It is super early stages right now. I am quickly hacking together the frontend prototype while Deeksha is working on the user journeys and wire-framing many of the UIs. Aurora is separate from TwelveCash, but will rely on some of the technology of TwelveCash for provisioning usernames for prisms.
What motivated this project? As the maintainer of a podcast, I frequently need to define payment splits among guests and the people who help with the show. I have personally found many of the prism solutions out there to not meet my needs fully. The podcasting 2.0 spec seems to rely on Keysends for prisms, which puts the burden entirely on the sending client. (And let’s face it, not every lightning wallet supports keysends). I also want more sophisticated control over managing lots of prisms, e.g. different prisms for different podcast episodes. Finally, I like having the ability to route some funds to bitcoin and some to USD. After trying Fountain.FM, BTCPay, and LNBits, I just found that nothing really did everything I wanted it to do. So, I’m hacking my own prism manager together.
Aurora will be a self-hosted prism manager, probably bundled with a lightning node like phoenixd.
You can follow progress here in a few spots:
Right now, I’m building out all the database stuff. We now have an architecture to support contacts, multiple payment methods per contact, and creating a prism construct with multiple contact’s payment methods. The web app will also connect to a phoenixd node. Next, I probably need to actually build out whatever a transaction looks like in aurora-land.
That’s It
I’m grateful for another week working on bitcoin and freedom-tech. Looking forward to another one!