Bitcoin startup Alby unveils ‘one-click’ Lightning app store with new ‘Hub’ service

Alby, the company behind the popular open-source Bitcoin browser extension for managing public and private keys locally, unveiled a new product that allows users to launch Bitcoin-based apps using a personal Lightning node.

“At Alby, we always focused on building tools and protocols to natively use the Lightning Network on the Web,” company founder ​​Michael Burmann said in a statement. 

While Lightning has become perhaps the most popular Bitcoin scaling solution, offering users cheaper and faster transactions than interacting with the base chain, adoption has been limited by the challenges of running a node at home. Instead of maintaining control over their own coins, today, many Lightning users opt for custodial solutions, which arguably cut against Bitcoin's founding ethos. 

To that end, Alby Hub also comes packaged with a “one-click install” Lightning node service and self-custodial wallet. Users can also connect to Bitcoin-native applications through a custom-built app store. The press release mentions applications like the social media apps Damus or Stacker News and external Lightning wallets. 

Burmann noted this fosters the self-sovereign aspects of the Bitcoin network and surrounding ecosystem while limiting the “technical overhead.” 

While a free “do-it-yourself” version exists to run Alby Hub on a personal computer, the company also has a payment option (21k sats per month worth about $15) to run the service in Alby’s cloud.