WebLN primary sources — 2026-05-03

Project status in this pass

• No canonical standalone WebLN whitepaper or litepaper surfaced.
• The clearest current source of truth is the official docs site plus the reference GitHub repository and docs repo.
• The materials consistently frame WebLN as a shared provider/spec layer between Lightning web apps and user-controlled wallets or nodes.

Primary-source snapshots

1) Official introduction

• URL: https://www.webln.dev/
• Key excerpt:
  • The docs describe WebLN as “a library and set of specifications for lightning apps and client providers to facilitate communication between apps and users’ lightning nodes in a secure way.”
  • They say it provides “a programmatic, permissioned interface” for applications to ask users to send payments, generate invoices, and more.
  • The same page positions WebLN for payment flows, decentralized identity/authentication, and wallet-provider implementation work.

2) Official getting-started guide

• URL: https://www.webln.dev/getting-started
• Key excerpt:
  • The guide says developers can install the webln package via npm or yarn or load it via a browser script.
  • It points developers toward requestProvider and the provider API methods as the main entry point.
  • It also lists companion quick-start libraries, reinforcing that WebLN is intended as reusable application infrastructure.

3) Reference repository

• URL: https://github.com/joule-labs/webln
• Key excerpt:
  • The repo says it provides “the spec and client libraries for WebLN” and defines WebLN as a way of interacting with a user’s Lightning node via the browser.
  • The README shows the main app-side pattern: call requestProvider(), then use the returned provider if available.
  • The provider interface exposed in the repo includes enable, getInfo, sendPayment, keysend, makeInvoice, signMessage, and verifyMessage.

4) Official docs repo linkage

• URL: https://github.com/wbobeirne/webln-docs
• Key excerpt:
  • The main docs pages link back to the public docs repository for edits and contribution.
  • This is a good signal that the documentation itself is part of the live standardization surface rather than a separate marketing layer.

5) Ecosystem examples in the docs

• URL: https://www.webln.dev/
• Key excerpt:
  • The intro page lists provider examples including Joule, Alby, BlueWallet, kwh, and Blixt Wallet.
  • It separately lists production apps such as Bitrefill, LNMarkets, Sparkshot, and Stacker News.
  • That provider/app split is the clearest evidence that WebLN is a shared interoperability layer rather than a single-wallet product.

Working conclusion

WebLN is best cataloged as browser-to-wallet Lightning interoperability infrastructure. The deciding evidence in this pass was the combination of its provider-discovery model, permissioned browser interface, standardized payment/invoice/signing methods, and the docs’ explicit framing of WebLN as the reusable communication layer between many Lightning apps and many wallet providers.