Lightning & Getting Paid

Bitrefill is an online store that sells gift cards, mobile top-ups, and prepaid services for Bitcoin and Lightning, making it a practical bridge between holding Bitcoin and paying for groceries, fuel, or travel. It is a regular company, not sovereign infrastructure: you trust it to deliver what you paid for, so treat it as a spending tool rather than a place to park value.

Blixt is a mobile wallet that runs a full Lightning node directly on your phone rather than outsourcing channel management to a company. That makes it sovereignty at the smallest scale: you open your own channels and route your own payments. The tradeoff is that you handle channel management yourself, which takes more learning than managed wallets like Phoenix.

BTCPay Server is a self-hosted payment processor that lets any business accept Bitcoin on-chain or over Lightning with no fees and no middleman. Unlike Stripe or a hosted crypto processor, nobody can freeze your account or censor a payment, because the whole stack runs on your own server. You take on hosting and maintenance, which is real work for a small operation.

Phoenix is a self-custodial Lightning wallet for iOS and Android made by ACINQ. You hold the keys; the app manages payment channels for you, with automatic on-chain fallback when needed. That convenience means ACINQ's infrastructure sits in the loop and channel-management fees apply, but for everyday Lightning spending it is the friendliest self-custodial option available.