🗼Alby NWC Relay

Use the Alby NWC Relay for your NWC wallet service

NWC is an open protocol to let your users connect their wallets to third-party applications and enjoy in-app payments. Dozens of apps and wallets support NWC already. Join the community.

What are NWC Wallet services?

To enable your bitcoin lightning wallet to be connected via the NWC protocol, you need to build an NWC wallet service, which takes care of:

1. Accessing the wallet for transactions and wallet information

2. Creating NWC URIs to initiate the connection between apps and your wallet

3. Sending and receiving NWC messages to facilitate lightning capabilities in connected apps

Watch these videos to see how much NWC improves the payment experience for users.

Why do I need an NWC relay?

NWC uses Nostr's relay technology to send and receive the mentioned NWC requests. As defined by the NWC specification a wallet service needs to issue NWC URIs containing the relay.

NWC does not specify any requirements on the type of a Nostr-compatible relay. However, it is recommended to use a dedicated relay. Doing so prevents metadata leaks and ensures reliability.

That's why Alby is offering a professionally operated relay specialized on NWC events.

How can I get started?

Interested wallet application aspiring to build a robust NWC wallet service can access the relay at: wss://relay.getalby.com/v1.

There is no authentication needed. We want you to focus on building instead of dealing with administrative topics.

To ensure enough capacity for your service, please reach out. We'll scale up the infrastructure for you.

There are two options to start sending and receiving events:

1. Use the NWC HTTP API to communicate events via HTTP instead of dealing with websockets.

2. Connect yourself to wss://relay.getalby.com/v1

In case of any questions, feel free to contact us.