The Bolt Card
Visa? No.
Mastercard? No.
Lightning? Yes.
The Bolt Card is simply a Lightning contactless card, powered by NFC and Bitcoin Lightning.
Making in-person payments with Bitcoin and Lightning is still not as efficient and user friendly as we need it to be for the mass audience. We’re still opening our phone, opening an app, scanning a QR code and then making the transaction. This is still a backwards step when it comes to UX in comparison to what we’re used to today for in person payments.
Taking note that 91% of in person payments in the UK were contactless card payments from a recent report by Barclaycard and globally contactless (NFC) payments are becoming more popular, it just makes sense that this is the most efficient experience for the user.
So we explored how we could make this happen in a secure, user friendly and interoperable way.
Enter The Bolt Card.
Using a standard NFC card, Lightning and LNURL, The Bolt Card enables a user to simply tap their card on the point of sale device displaying the Lightning invoice and the Lightning payment is made in the background. All transacted over Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, not a single legacy payment system used.
Use cases
Lightning Debit Card
CoinCorner customers can now use the CoinCorner app to connect their wallet to The Bolt Card with a few simple clicks, allowing them to spend with the card like you would a debit card attached to your bank account.
Gift*
Again using the CoinCorner app you can setup as many cards as you like to gift out to friends and family.
For example topping a Bolt Card up with $20 worth of Bitcoin and then giving to a friend, they can then tap this on their phone (NFC) and sweep the Bitcoin into their own Lightning wallet of choice.
The gift card industry is an estimated $1 trillion market globally and again this is excluding the countries without the technical infrastructure that Bitcoin won’t exclude.
Prepaid*
Using the CoinCorner app you can also setup a card in more of a prepaid method, just topping the card up with $20 for example, so you can tap and pay until the $20 is used.
Prepaid cards currently have towards a $2 trillion market, so the demand is certainly out there, even currently excluding countries that don’t have the financial infrastructure to cater.
Websites
Paying with The Bolt Card on a website?!?
Yes you can, something that has never really been done before within the legacy system, when shopping on your phone and paying via the Bitcoin option, you simply tap your card against your phone and the Lightning payment is made automatically.
This means no entering card details or even the requirement to have a Lightning wallet on your phone.
Industry compatibility
We’ve worked hard to make sure we kept The Bolt Card interoperable within current industry protocols, namely Lightning and LNURL.
By doing so it’s made it very easy for payment gateways around the world to introduce the NFC capability to interact with The Bolt Card.
Here are just a few Bitcoin payment gateways now compatible or working towards compatibility with The Bolt Card, CoinCorner, BTCPay Server, Ibex Mercado, LNBits, FastBitcoins.
For Gift cards, compatibility will work for the majority as long as they support LNURLW, such as Phoenix, Blixt, Blue Wallet, Muun, Zebedee, SimpleBitcoinWallet, Wallet of Satoshi, Zeus and Breez.
Why this route?
As we all know with Bitcoin, it doesn’t discriminate, it’s global, permission-less and censorship resistant, meaning unlike the Visa’s of the world, The Bolt Card is available to all 7.7 billion people in the world.
It’s cheap, interoperable with other Lightning wallets and gateways and can be operated in both a custodial and non-custodial manner. And yes, even over Tor!
Over the coming months we will help introduce options to allow people to operate their own Bolt Card in a non-custodial manner. Very Soon™
It’s also outside of the gatekeepers such as Android and iOs via the likes of Google Pay and Apple Pay.
Future developments
We are still early…. understatement of the year!
As we continue to make Lightning an everyday usable use case we will explore other concepts around The Bolt Card, like a button on each card that allows for a payment to be processed, potentially as far as a finger print scanner on the card to validate the payment. But with additional features improving the security and product itself, comes the unfortunate additional cost, but as we receive feedback and learn we will create better products, Soon™.
Bringing this NFC capability into our Android and iOs app will also be on the roadmap, but as mentioned this depends on the gatekeepers approvals and interoperability. Maybe Soon™
Standing on the shoulders of giants
We couldn’t have done this without the hard work done by many and for that we thank you all, everyone plays a part in this ecosystem, we’re just a small piece of the bigger picture.
Thanks to those working on Lightning, from the creators, individuals and companies all involved in making Lightning what it is today.
Thanks to the LNURL mafia guys, a great bunch of guys working towards a great user experience when interacting with Lightning.
Fiatjaf, André, Hampus, Ben Arc, Kukks and many more!
Thanks to all the Bitcoin Core developers, obviously we’d be lost without you guys.
All the heroes we don’t deserve.
Thanks to all the team at CoinCorner, especially Zakk who has been fundamental to the creation.
And of course all you Plebs out there orange pilling every chance you get.
CoinCorner
Innovation to drive Bitcoin adoption is what we do at CoinCorner, while others are releasing visa cards with unrealistic long term reward schemes to attract customers to enter their shitcoin casino. We’re building real products for the real world and yes we mean the world, all 7.7 billion of us.
Forget your altcoins, “Blockchain”, “DeFi”, NFTs and every other substance-less buzz word we’ve seen over the years, this is real world innovation with real world products that will help real world people in every day life.
Bootstrapped from day 1 with no funding (ok we had $200,000 in 2015 from a single Angel), we’re still here 8 years later, we’re focused on building products with long term real world value, if we can do this, why hasn’t your “favourite” shitcoin casino done this? We are not the same.
We have more big plans ahead, keep an eye out through 2022, the beginning of the future is here.
Bring on hyperbitcoinization!
Want to buy “The Bolt Card”? Go get one now here!
If you have any questions drop me a DM
https://twitter.com/CoinCornerDanny
*Additional notes/information
The current prepaid and gift card options should only be used once per pay/sweep, as they do not currently have the advanced security that the debit card option offers. This will be introduced over time as more Lightning wallets support LUD17.
