Exchange · custodial-bitcoin-only

River

What it is. A US Bitcoin-only financial-services company — buy, sell, hold, and (for some products) Lightning send/receive. No altcoins. Oriented toward serious accumulation and institutional/business accounts as well as retail.

What it bridges. Fiat (US bank, wire) ↔ BTC. On-chain and, for supported flows, Lightning.

Agent access — nothing public, as of 2026-08-06. River formerly published a Lightning-payments API, River Lightning Services (RLS) — send/receive over Lightning, on-chain deposit addresses, Lightning withdrawals. It was never a buy/sell trading API, and programmatic fiat→BTC conversion was never publicly exposed. Its documentation and marketing site are now gone: docs.rls.dev does not resolve, rls.dev serves nothing, and the last archived capture is 2026-04-01 with no deprecation notice published anywhere. The documented way to get access was a contact form on that site, so there is no public front door left — no docs, no signup, no River-hosted page, no help-centre article, no SDK. Whether RLS still serves existing enterprise contracts is not knowable from outside; what is checkable is that a new developer cannot reach it. Treat River as an owner-operated venue with no agent-drivable path.

How an agent uses it. It doesn’t, directly. River is a place an owner accumulates and custodies; an agent’s involvement stops at receiving what the owner sends. (RLS powered El Salvador’s Chivo backend, which is why the Lightning capability was worth carding at all — but that capability is no longer publicly obtainable.) Not a programmatic fiat↔BTC trading venue.

Coverage. United States–focused; state-level availability varies — see the venue.

Dependencies & payment. A KYC’d US River account, opened and operated by a person. Fund via US bank/wire; buys are owner-initiated. There is no publicly available programmatic path — the RLS API that used to provide one is no longer documented or obtainable.

Gotchas. Custodial and US-regulated — KYC at onboarding, account-level freeze surface until withdrawal to self-custody. US bank rails mean fiat-leg latency (ACH/wire) on the fiat side.

Links. river.com. (The RLS API docs link is deliberately absent: docs.rls.dev no longer resolves and River publishes no replacement. A dead link is worse than none — and this one returned 200 for months in search results while resolving nowhere.)