We're excited to announce the alpha release of Wavelength, a toolkit for adding self-custodial bitcoin (and stablecoin) payments to any application, designed to create the best developer experience for humans and agents. The Lightning Network gives the world instant, global, low-fee payments where every user controls their own funds, but using it previously meant running infrastructure most builders didn't want to integrate, manage, or maintain. Wavelength exists to close that gap. It takes everything hard about integrating bitcoin and turns it into a few simple API calls, so any developer, vibe coder, or agent can give their app a working bitcoin wallet without learning how Lightning works under the hood. Wavelength is open to everyone today on signet and testnet with mainnet access available by invite.

Payments on the open internet should be as easy to add as a card-processing API, but instant, global, and fully under the user's control, without demanding all sorts of personal data just to move a few dollars. The goal of Wavelength is to make Lightning that simple, and to bring it from the developers who already love it to a much larger group who simply want payments that work. It starts with bitcoin, and stablecoins are on the way, so the same simple surface will move both. This is an early release, but the aim is a payments toolkit so easy that building with bitcoin stops being a specialist's job and becomes something any developer, vibe coder, or agent can do in an afternoon.

We envision a world where bitcoin and stablecoin payments permeate through a wide variety of applications, services, and tools. Imagine an AI agent can easily autonomously pay for things whether that’s an API call, a data feed, or another agent's service, in fractions of a cent, with no card and no account. A subscription app can charge a few cents a month instead of a flat monthly minimum. A marketplace can settle between buyers and sellers in seconds rather than days.

Wavelength starts with bitcoin, with stablecoins coming soon through Taproot Assets, Lightning Labs' protocol for issuing assets like stablecoins on bitcoin and transacting on Lightning, so the same simple API will support both. Given the Alpha release, your input is critical in helping us shape the evolution of the APIs and overall behavior. So, while you’re building, tell us what’s working and what isn’t. Wavelength will be shaped by the developers, vibe coders, and agents who build on it.

Why We Built Easy Mode for Bitcoin Transactions 💳

Sending and receiving bitcoin over Lightning has traditionally meant running your own node, opening and balancing payment channels, sourcing liquidity, and keeping that infrastructure up and running at all times. That operational burden has kept bitcoin out of reach for a large contingent of developers and businesses.

The capability the Lightning Network promises, instant settlement, global reach, fees small enough for micropayments, has been gated behind a level of operational complexity that only specialists could justify. Wavelength removes that barrier. You drop a small client into your app, call a handful of friendly commands, and you have a self-custodial bitcoin wallet that can send and receive over Lightning. No node to run, no channels to manage, no liquidity to source. If you can call an API, you can support bitcoin.

The reality is that most builders don't want to operate a Lightning node any more than they want to run their own payment processor; they want the capability, instant settlement and global reach, without owning the machinery underneath it. Wavelength is built to deliver exactly that, and to bring it to everyone the complexity has kept out: the developer adding bitcoin to a side project, the vibe coder shipping their first app, the company that wants to offer bitcoin transactions to its users, and the agent that needs to pay for what it uses. Our goal is to make plugging into the Lightning Network simple enough that building on bitcoin is not a niche, specialist skill and is something developers (and agents) reach for by default.

To be clear, this isn't about replacing the do-it-yourself path. Lightning has always offered a fully self-sovereign option, where you run your own node and channels and answer to no one, and that option isn't going anywhere. Anyone who wants to can always use it. What we've learned is that people sit at very different points on the spectrum of how much infrastructure they're willing to run. Wavelength is for everyone who would rather not run it at all, without giving up control of their funds.

A Wallet Your Agent Can Actually Use 🤖

The same API that's easy for a human is exposed to AI agents as typed tool calls through MCP (Model Context Protocol, a standardized way for AI assistants to call external tools). An agent can hold a bitcoin balance and send and receive bitcoin as part of a workflow: paying for an API the moment it calls one, buying a data feed, settling up with another agent, all in fractions of a cent with no card, no account, and no human approving each transaction. Wallet creation and unlock deliberately stay on the command line and never pass over the agent channel, so seeds and passwords are never exposed to the model.

This fits a transaction pattern that's becoming central to agent commerce. With L402, an open protocol that uses Lightning with machine-native authentication built in, any API can ask for a few sats per request instead of a monthly subscription and an API key. An agent hits the endpoint, the server replies with a Lightning invoice, the agent pays it, and it gets access, with no signup and no pre-existing relationship. Credentials are purchased on the fly, not provisioned in advance, which is exactly how autonomous agents need to operate. Wavelength gives an agent the ability to do this, and the same API can power the other side, letting a developer charge per request for whatever their service offers.

The reason this works is that the API was shaped for agents from the start: clear commands, structured JSON in and out, and a surface small enough that a model can drive it without custom integration glue. Lightning’s instant, global payments are a natural fit for machine-to-machine commerce, and Wavelength is how we're putting that capability in agents' hands today.

The Wavelength docs are also built for this way of working, with an agent in the loop. There's an llms.txt index and a full-corpus llms-full.txt for one-shot ingestion, a Markdown mirror of every page (append .md to any docs URL), and one command that drops Wavelength skills into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Gemini CLI, and more:

npx skills add lightninglabs/wavelength-sdk

Point your agent at the agent onboarding page and it can read, install, and wire up a self-custodial wallet on its own. And with wavecli mcp serve, it can use bitcoin with typed tool calls. So, agents can not just write the integration but also run it.

Self-Custodial and Exit Anytime 🔑

Wavelength wallets are self-custodial, which means the user holds their own keys and stays in control of their funds. Behind the scenes, a coordination service settles transfers between users instantly and at very low cost, so no one has to run their own infrastructure to transact. But that service never has unilateral control of any user funds.

A user can always move their balance back to the bitcoin blockchain on their own, at any time, without anyone's cooperation or permission. The wallet exposes this directly through an exit command. For developers building on Wavelength, and for the people who use what they build, custody never leaves the user's hands. You get the convenience of a managed payments experience with the trust guarantees of holding your own bitcoin.

Under the hood, this is powered by an Ark-like settlement layer, a bitcoin scaling protocol that batches off-chain transfers efficiently while keeping users in control of their funds.

One Invoice for Every Payment 🧾

Lightning payments use a standard invoice format called BOLT 11, and Wavelength uses it for every off-chain payment. Every payment you send and receive is a BOLT 11 invoice, which means there's a single payment format to learn and your wallet works with the entire Lightning Network the moment you integrate it.

Because Wavelength speaks the same language as the rest of Lightning, you can transact with the businesses, exchanges, wallets, and apps already on the network, with no extra integration work and no walled garden. From your code's point of view, sending and receiving are always the same familiar invoice, and Wavelength figures out the best way to settle each one. Wavelength users can also pay or receive on-chain via normal bitcoin addresses.

Deep, Reliable Liquidity Through Loop 🔄

For a seamless user experience, payments have to be routed reliably across the network, and reliable routing takes deep liquidity, the funds positioned across Lightning to carry payments from sender to receiver. Sourcing and managing that liquidity is one of the hardest parts of running Lightning infrastructure, and Wavelength handles it for you.

Wavelength connects to Lightning through Loop, Lightning Labs' liquidity service that has spent years moving real volume across the network and sits among its most connected points. In practice, you inherit world-class Lightning liquidity from day one without sourcing, funding, or managing any of it. With that, you get reliable payments without managing channels or liquidity.

During the closed alpha, Lightning transactions will have a minimal (1 basis point) service fee with the normal Lightning Network routing fees still applying. Ordinary bitcoin network fees apply whenever your funds touch the blockchain, including on-chain deposits and withdrawals. The client automatically handles keeping the balance refreshed so you can unilaterally exit. If you more actively manage beyond those automated operations, an additional fee may apply. This is alpha pricing and may change as the product evolves.

What the Developer Experience Looks Like 🧑‍💻

Wavelength is built around a small set of commands that cover the full lifecycle of sending and receiving bitcoin:

• create / unlock: spin up or open a self-custodial wallet.
• balance: read the wallet's balance.
• recv: get a receive address or a Lightning (BOLT 11) invoice.
• send: pay a Lightning (BOLT 11) invoice, or send on-chain.
• activity: see a normalized history of payments.
• exit: move funds back to the bitcoin blockchain unilaterally, the self-custody guarantee in code.

A typical flow is as short as it sounds: create a wallet, recv an invoice to get paid, and send to pay someone else. For payments, recv and send both speak BOLT 11, so the unified invoice format shows up right here in the API.

There are a few ways to integrate, depending on what you're building. You can run a single self-contained client driven over a clean gRPC and REST API. You can embed the SDK to put bitcoin support inside your app. You can pull in the WASM package to run the wallet in the browser. Or you can run the MCP server so AI agents can drive the wallet as tools. To dive into the potential implementation path and details, check out the Wavelength documentation.

What's Next 🔮

Stablecoins are coming soon to Wavelength through Taproot Assets, which will let your app integrate stablecoins with the same simple commands you use for bitcoin.

We're also investing in mobile support, so embedding Wavelength in a mobile app becomes as smooth as it is on the server. If you're a mobile developer, we'd love for you to reach out, test early builds, and help shape where mobile support lands. Future releases of Wavelength will support the ability to have funds in Lightning channels, harnessing the battle-tested LND implementation to seamlessly enable micropayments.

The docs already go deep on how everything works. But, we'll also be publishing a series of technical posts on the same, so keep an eye out if you want the full deep dive.

Start Building 🛠️🤖

The fastest way to explore Wavelength is to try it. Open the live demo in your browser and you have a real self-custodial wallet in seconds on signet, with no signup needed and fully non-custodial, as keys are generated and stored on your device. Create a wallet, fund it, and send and receive end-to-end, with nothing to install.

Wavelength is open to everyone today on bitcoin test networks, so you can integrate the full transaction flow today. As you start to build, check out the Wavelength developer docs, including the agent onboarding page, and our Builder’s Guide content. When you're ready to go live with real funds, early mainnet access is available by requesting an invite. We’re working hard to deliver full mainnet availability in the next release.

To start, spin up a wallet and run a payment end to end. Point an agent at it through MCP and let it pay for something on its own. And, most importantly, tell us what works, what doesn't, and what's missing, because this is an alpha and your feedback is how it gets better.

The hard parts of integrating bitcoin are now abstracted away. Whether you're a Lightning veteran who runs the infrastructure yourself, a developer building on bitcoin for the first time, or an agent reading this and looking for a way to transact (hello 👋), Wavelength is for you. Bitcoin doesn’t care if you’re a human or an agent, and neither does Wavelength. Ride the wave and build the future of money! 🌊