Alby Hub lets you connect all your wallet apps to a single payment backend. It takes care of most wallet operations for you, but managing the Lightning node behind it can still be a challenge. Thanks to the Alby team's new Bark integration, you can now enable Lightning payments in your Alby Hub with no Lightning node, channels, or liquidity to manage.

Bark is Second's implementation of the Ark protocol, and Alby built their integration on the Bark SDK in record time, shipping just days after our mainnet launch. Alby Hub is a natural fit for Bark: an always-on server whose whole job is making payments easy.

One hub, dozens of apps

Alby Hub is an always-on bitcoin engine. It runs continuously on a home server or in the cloud, secures your keys, and executes payments. Wallet apps don't need to embed any bitcoin machinery themselves; they connect to your hub over Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC), a protocol for requesting everything a wallet needs: invoices, payments, balances, and transaction history.

Through the integration, Bark can immediately power a whole ecosystem of clients:

  • Mobile and browser wallets: Alby Go, the Alby browser extension, and Zeus
  • Nostr clients: Damus, Amethyst, and Primal, for one-tap zaps
  • Apps and services: Stacker News, Fountain, BTCPay Server, LNbits, and many more
  • Agents: Enable payments in Claude, GPT, and other chatbots with the Alby Payment Skill

Connect any of them with a single NWC pairing string, and they all spend from the same balance. You always stay in control: each app has permissioned, budgeted access.

Simple Lightning payments for multiple apps and services powered by Alby Hub with Bark enabled. Apps connect over NWC.

The hard part was always the Lightning node

Until now, Alby Hub typically ran a Lightning node to power Lightning payments (LND, LDK, phoenixd, etc.). That meant the operator inherited everything that comes with one: opening channels, sourcing inbound liquidity, and keeping channels balanced. Alby and LSPs minimized the burden with automation, but the friction never fully disappears.

Bark replaces channels with an Ark balance

With Bark as the backend, there are no channels and no liquidity to manage. Bitcoin at rest is held in VTXOs, self-custodial off-chain outputs that can be exited on-chain if you ever need to. When a connected app requests a Lightning payment over NWC, Alby Hub pays the invoice directly from the Ark balance, with the Ark server providing the Lightning connectivity. Receiving works the same way: incoming payments simply land in the hub's Ark balance as new VTXOs.

There are no channels to open, no rebalancing, and no force closures. Fees are predictable and extremely low, because the Ark server only allocates liquidity at the moment a payment actually happens, rather than locking up capital in channels in advance. The trade-off is reliance on a single Ark server for payment liveness, though your funds remain self-custodial throughout, with an emergency exit always available.

A new integration path for wallet builders

Alby Hub also opens up a third way to build on Bark. Until now, integrators had two options: embed the Bark SDK directly in their app, or run barkd as a backend service. Now, any wallet app that already speaks NWC can be powered by Bark with zero integration work; it's entirely up to the user, who simply connects the app to an Alby Hub running the Bark backend. And if you're building a new wallet app, you can keep it essentially UI-only and leave the bitcoin machinery to Alby Hub.

Alby even offer a builder skill to keep agents like Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor on the right path when integrating Alby Hub payments into your apps.

Take it for a spin

Alby Hub's Bark backend is ready for testing. When setting up a new Alby Hub, self-hosting users can enable Ark under the "Advanced Setup" option.

Alby Hub's Lightning backend picker during setup, showing Bark alongside LDK, phoenixd, LND, Cashu Mint, and CLN

Options to get Alby Hub running alongside Bark:

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