Substack Starts Accepting Bitcoin Payments Via Lightning Network

Substack started accepting bitcoin payments via the lightning network after a partnership with OpenNodes as we are reading more in our latest Bitcoin news today.

The San Francisco-based company will work with OpenNodes to make this happen as Substack is a popular website that allows writers to set up their own subscription-based newsletters. It announced that Substack starts accepting Bitcoin payments with the use of the Lightning Network but only for a few publishers so far.

Substack allows writers to set up subscription publications and people use it to launch newsletters covering everything from crypto to comic books. Some Substack newsletters are free but the writers can charge readers for the consuming content. The option to pay in BTC will be available to crypto publications for now and there are other newsletters on the platform but the feature is now only live for two, Willy Woo’s Bitcoin Forecast and Dan Held’s “The Held Report.” the company said:

“Substack has started enabling Bitcoin payments—beginning with select crypto publications—as a payment option for those publications’ subscribers around the world, and we’re looking forward to exploring broader availability depending on feedback and demand.”

The company said in an announcement that it will work with BTC payments processor company OpenNode for the initaitive as it will use the Lightning Network to process faster payments but there will be options to make payments on-chain without the lightning. The network speeds up the transactions and reduces the costs by skirting Bitcoin’s blockchain. Substack explained:

“Readers will be able to use Bitcoin to pay for subscriptions to these select publications, and the publications will retain earnings in Bitcoin.”

OpenNode said that this is the first live inititive that allows writers and creators to accept BTC that the company worked on but there will be other platforms that will financially empower content creators. Substack was founded in 2017 and is backed by a number of investors like Andreessen Horowitz.

As recently reported, The world’s biggest crypto by market cap surpassed $50,000 and the time of writing it is up by 2.6% in the past 24 hours or 5.6% in the past week but also 55% in the past month according to CoinGecko. The last time we saw bitcoin at this level was in May just after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that his company will not accept BTC as a payment for the cars due to environmental concerns. That news along with the crackdown in China sent BTC crashing in the next few days that followed.