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As some of you might have noticed earlier, the service has stopped operating with the end of 2023. The latest fiat gateway that I was using, while being supportive and friendly, was becoming less useful with randomly delaying and canceling payments. The quality of the service eventually became unacceptable, so I decided to shut it down for good instead of ruining its reputation before shutting it down anyway.

It was fun (and profit) while it lasted, even though the problems of fiat currency interactions continued to bite me all the time. When the exchange started in May 2019, it was a telegram bot with a cumbersome multi-step lightning invoicing process. Lightning network was in its infancy, only small payments were routed well. My fiat provider supported multiple payment destinations, without a base fee on literally everything except payout to bank cards. Topping up a mobile phone or a yandex.money wallet for $0.50 was feasible back then, and I gladly added new payment destinations to the bot.

In August 2019 I came across a draft of the Lnurl-pay protocol spec. Instead of negotiating the payment amount, it proposed an instant delivery of the invoice over https, which invoice was then possibly overpaid. It was useful enough for my purposes, but after some discussion with fiatjaf and akumaigorodski they decided to go with the negotiation step, now having minSendable and maxSendable. Now I was able to assign a Lnurl-pay template to each payment destination, with destination-specific amount limits, and “throwing some sats to my Russian mobile phone balance” became just the matter of one QR code scan.

I'm pretty confident that I was the first in the world to implement a Lnurl-pay server, several days before it became supported for outgoing payments in the SBW wallet.

In July 2021 my friend has pointed me to an Ukrainian payment system that I became using for fiat payments in Ukrainian Hryvnia. It was working way better and faster than Qiwi/RUB, with low fees, good speed and a real possibility of micropayments to bank cards (and it also supported mobile phone top-ups). With its help I was able to provide Lightning-to-UAH payments until March 2023.

In September 2021 I added Lightning addresses. The use of my service became possible without ever visiting its website. You send funds to 2000UAH-4111111111111111@uacard.lnurl-pay.me, you instantly see the amount in satoshi, you pay (or not) — that's all. If my business were attracting customers to my site, it would be awful for business.

Then it went all downhill in the fiat world. I had to remove most payout directions, sometimes tighten the limits, and couldn't promise nearly-instant payouts I was so proud of. And now, the service is shut down because I'm not expecting nice things we had back then to be available again. I'm undecided on where to go further, but probably I will focus on lightning-only services without having to interact with fiat anymore.