S11 E3: Adrian, Patrick & Bastian on Lipa

Lipa is a Swiss-made service which aims to make Bitcoin payments simple. At first glance, it’s a wallet with Point of Sale features – something which mixes the simplicity of Breez wallet with the power of BTCPay Server, but written from scratch with a light design. Ultimately, the goal is to provide an intuitive way for businesses to accept bitcoin via Lightning network.

As of June 2022, the Lipa wallet is still in “stealth mode” and can’t be used or reviewed by people outside the organization. But as soon as it’s ready for release, the code will also get open sourced so everyone can verify how Lipa works under the hood.

According to project co-founders Adrian, Patrick and Bastian, the Lipa wallet and point of sale features aim to support restaurants, bars, and businesses that normally handle cash payments. But Lipa is non-custodial by design at all levels: the development team has no access to their users’ funds, while the restaurant owners will not be able to freeze the bitcoins from an employee’s wallet. It’s sovereign all the way down to the smallest user.

Furthermore, the business model revolves around the open source design: there will be no intermediary fees for the wallet and there can’t be any top-down denial of service. The owners of businesses which accept bitcoin payments will set up accounts for their employees and determine their roles. If somebody gets fired, they can be prevented from receiving payments in the company account – but the tips that they received for their work will be theirs until they voluntarily decide to spend them.

There’s definitely a lot of potential in a service like Lipa, which keeps it simple and targets small businesses willing to dip their toes into bitcoin. And if the project succeeds, the plans are even more ambitious: famous pop singer Dua Lipa is on the list to promote the launch of an upcoming version 2.0.

Listen to Adrian, Patrick, and Bastian talk about Lipa on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & more!

If you use any of the big tech platforms, please don’t forget to subscribe, like, and leave comments/reviews. They don’t only look nice and make me prouder of my work, but also tell the search algorithms to display the content on a higher-ranked position.

Furthermore, if you’re looking for a private and registration-free way to listen to the recording, then check out this free player. It allows you to enjoy the content from the onion-routed convenience of the Tor browser and also features a download button for offline listening.

This Episode Is Sponsored By Vaultoro And Wasabi Wallet

Joshua from Vaultoro is a big fan of the show and I’m happy that he sees potential in my work and supports it without caring about numbers and growth statistics. So I must thank him for his generosity and invite you to check out Vaultoro – the exchange where you can trade with honest money (bitcoin, gold, and silver). 

None of this is financial advice from me, but I’m pretty sure that the shiny rock is a better store of value than any fiat currency or “stablecoin”, so maybe it would be wise to use this commodity to preserve your purchasing power during bear markets and get back into bitcoin as soon as you’re convinced that the downwards movement are over. You can also have the gold bars delivered to your house… because you know, if it’s not in your safe then it’s stored somewhere in Switzerland where you can’t touch it whenever you please. For more information, check out Vaultoro’s website.

Also, Joshua from Vaultoro is sponsoring a Lightning Network faucet – he hopes that Bitcoin’s second layer will one day become potent and popular enough to replace the smart contract and tokenization features of Ethereum. And he also supported Giacomo Zucco’s layer 3 RGB Spectrum experimentation from 2019. 

If you would like to increase your network-level and transaction privacy, you should download Wasabi Wallet on your computer. It routes your connection through the Tor network to hide your IP, it downloads block filters so you validate your own transactions locally without appealing to a trusted third party, and it also connects to your own full node to boost your financial sovereignty. Extra features include advanced hardware wallet integrations, easy UTXO management, address reuse prevention, and even a lurker wife mode.

Wasabi is best known for its link-breaking CoinJoins, which are giving a hard time even to the EuroPol. Use the wallet to increase your financial sovereignty, but don’t do any illegal stuff – use your financial sovereignty with responsibility (also read the Wasabi terms of service).