Starting today, the app will let you pay with Bitcoin instantly - even if you don't hold any - by automatically converting your USD balance on the app into bitcoin for the merchant. In a series of app features announced today, the app will now spend bitcoin locally, pay in USD over the Lightning Network, and send or receive stablecoins.
The company is launching an assistant called Moneybot that can answer questions about spending patterns and income, and provide insights for maintaining savings and setting aside money for investments. The chatbot will be available to select users at launch, with broader availability planned for the coming months. Users can ask questions like "Can you show me my monthly income, expenses, and spending patterns?" to get reports about their accounts.
Thanks to modern wallets and managed platforms, getting up and running can be low friction, secure and even enjoyable. But the moment you decide to take on the role of routing payments for others - hoping to earn satoshis from fees - the game changes completely. The Hidden Pitfalls of Running a Remote Lightning Node Running a remote Lightning node can be a powerful way to participate in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
In 2025, subnetworks are emerging that revive the impetus of channel factories with some new details that vastly increase their potential. They are natively interoperable with Lightning and achieve greater scale by allowing a group of participants to open a shared multisig UTXO and create multiple bilateral channels, which reduces the number of on-chain transactions and improves capital efficiency. Achieving greater scale by reducing complexity, Ark and Spark perform the same function as traditional channel factories with new designs and additional capabilities based on shared UTXOs.