ZEBEDEE Announces NBD – Open Source Bitcoin Initiative to Further Payments Innovation

ZEBEDEE, a leading FinTech and next-generation payment processor for the gaming industry, today announced a new initiative that contributes open source code and products to the Bitcoin Lightning space. The new not-for-profit and completely open source initiative has already resulted in several products and code repositories that push the frontier of what’s possible to build on the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

ZEBEDEE is a modern financial services provider for the gaming industry that uses the Bitcoin Lightning Network as the underlying technology for processing millions of nanotransactions to anyone in the world instantly and at practically zero cost. While its business itself is not focused on Bitcoin per se, ZEBEDEE does build on the technology as the backbone of its infrastructure. To enable more companies to do the same, ZEBEDEE has created NBD (No Big Deal) as a way to give back to the space.

“NBD does not sell anything, it does not offer services, it does not support products. It just writes code and gives it to the world to do with it as they will,” said Andre Neves, co-founder and CTO of ZEBEDEE and a well known contributor to open source Bitcoin Lightning development. “We basically created an entire suite of tools for the modern sovereign individual, from the client you’d use to set up a node, to the wallet you’d use to manage your funds in a self-sovereign way. Anyone can now take any of what we’ve built and use it themselves, or completely transform it and create products of their own. It’s important to us to have something real, concrete and useful to show before we talk about it, so this has actually been a long time coming. But it’s No Big Deal, really.”

At the core of NBD is the idea that innovation thrives best when it’s open and accessible to everyone. When one person creates a technological breakthrough, we all benefit. All tech companies today rely heavily on open source code in some way, especially those that build on top of Bitcoin – an open source technology not owned by anyone or any company. ZEBEDEE now joins the list of companies following this ethos. As of now, NBD has already released the following solutions:

• Open Bitcoin Wallet – an advanced non-custodial Bitcoin Lightning wallet with support for hosted channels.

• Poncho – CoreLightning (CLN) plugin that allows a node operator to run and serve Hosted Channels for wallets like OBW (or any others).

• Cliche – a daemon that lets you spin up a Lightning Node with built-in support for Hosted Channels

• Immortan – a Lightning Network Library (akin to LDK) that allows wallet builders to add Lightning Network capabilities to their wallets in a plug-and-play way.

At the core of this first wave of releases, NBD has focused its highly technical contributions to the Bitcoin Lightning space around the novel concept of Hosted Channels – a technology that makes moving money on the Lightning Network easier and less capital intensive. Put in layman’s terms, Hosted Channels remove the need for Bitcoin to be locked up inside a Lightning channel for payments to be able to move. Normally, Lightning channels require Bitcoin to be locked up inside them to provide liquidity, which tends to lead to inefficient use of capital and makes it harder for people without existing Bitcoin reserves to use the payments functionality of the Lightning Network themselves (meaning without using a custodial service like ZEBEDEE).

This opens the door to more people running their own software, clients and infrastructure instead of using for-profit services like ZEBEDEE. But that’s kind of the point of Bitcoin, so it’s No Big Deal.