LNCurl

• Name: LNCurl
• URL: https://lncurl.lol/
• Category: agent-first Lightning wallet API / disposable custodial wallet bootstrap
• Tags: bitcoin-ecosystem nostr-ecosystem
• Summary: LNCurl is a small custodial bootstrap service for agent wallets. One API call creates a Lightning wallet and hands back a usable Nostr Wallet Connect URI plus a Lightning address. Wallets pay 1 sat per hour to stay alive; if they stop paying, they are deleted. This is disposable automation plumbing, not a serious wallet stack.
• What it does:
  • Creates a Lightning wallet with a single HTTP request and returns an NWC connection string that can be used immediately by an app or agent
  • Exposes a ready-made lud16 Lightning address so the new wallet can receive as well as send through NWC-compatible tools
  • Charges a recurring 1 sat per hour maintenance fee and deletes wallets that can no longer pay, making disposability part of the product design
  • Publishes machine-readable docs and live service endpoints covering wallet counts, charges collected, activity, and node or liquidity state
  • Runs on top of Alby Hub plus Nostr Wallet Connect instead of introducing a new wallet-control standard
• Key claims:
  • The homepage and README both describe LNCurl as “Lightning wallets for agents” and emphasize one-call wallet creation, which is the cleanest summary of the product
  • The published docs say wallets cost 1 sat per hour to maintain and are deleted when they cannot pay, making the service explicitly temporary rather than softly custodial
  • The machine-readable llms.txt and the project skill doc both frame LNCurl around temporary wallets, testing, and child-agent bootstrapping instead of long-term balance storage
  • The public stats endpoint showed active usage during this pass, which is useful evidence that the service is live rather than just a concept page
• Whitepaper: No canonical standalone LNCurl whitepaper or litepaper surfaced in this pass. The clearest source of truth was the official site, the GitHub README, the machine-readable llms.txt, the public skill doc, and the live stats endpoint; see ../whitepapers/lncurl-primary-sources-2026-05-03.md.
• Sources:
  • https://lncurl.lol/
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rolznz/lncurl/master/README.md
  • https://lncurl.lol/llms.txt
  • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rolznz/lncurl/master/frontend/public/SKILL.md
  • https://lncurl.lol/api/stats

Internal linkages

• Best anchors: alby and nostr-wallet-connect.

Control surface

• The leverage is in wallet creation, NWC credential issuance, maintenance-fee collection, and forced deletion once a wallet can no longer pay.

• So the useful question is not whether setup is easy. It is how much trust the caller is handing to a hosted wallet bootstrapper for a short-lived job.

• Last reviewed: 2026-06-04 UTC