Services · payments
Amboss Payments
One GraphQL API to send, receive, and settle in BTC, USDT, and USDC over Lightning — multi-asset payments infrastructure for businesses, with a self-custodial option.
What it is
Amboss Payments is a “Stripe for Lightning”: a single GraphQL API to send, receive, and settle in BTC, USDT, and USDC — “in seconds, for near-zero fees, 24/7,” with more assets stated as coming. Under the hood it runs an LND node (Lightning Labs’ implementation) that the customer can self-host or cloud-host, and inside that one node the customer can spin up separate per-currency wallets — a USDT wallet, a USDC wallet, a plain BTC wallet. Taproot Assets handles conversion within a single payment, and Amboss manages the FX and liquidity behind the scenes, so a sender can pay in one denomination and a receiver settle in another.
The conversion happens at the edge, not on the network. To receive, the merchant generates an ordinary BTC Lightning invoice — but it carries a routing hint on the last hop, known only to the merchant, that converts to the target currency at that final hop. The invoice itself is just a standard Bitcoin Lightning invoice for an amount of BTC; the value travels as Bitcoin the entire way, and only the two endpoints ever deal in dollars. The practical effect is dollar stability over scalable Lightning rails — e.g. a Cash App customer can pay a merchant with neither side needing to know Lightning or Bitcoin is involved at all. Settlement is final in under a second (redeemable on-chain via unilateral exit, so funds are never trapped), and because the same Lightning payment method is already used inside large consumer apps (Cash App, Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and hundreds of wallets), a single integration reaches those users without per-app deals.
Its target users are businesses — exchanges, wallets, payment providers, and similar — that want multi-asset, dollar-denominated value to move over Lightning rails behind one integration.
When to use it
- A business or agent needs to hold and move dollars (USDT/USDC) and bitcoin over Lightning behind a single API.
- You want machine-tempo settlement with the option to receive in a different asset than the sender paid.
- You want a managed payments rail rather than running your own multi-asset Lightning stack.
Dependencies & payment
A business account and Amboss’s platform fee — a flat 0.5% of volume plus $100/month, all-in (per the 2026-07 payments deck), on top of network fees. The product advertises a self-custodial option — “Maintain control of your keys. No mandatory custody transfer.” — though managed/hosted tiers may involve more trust; confirm per deployment. The API and an official TypeScript SDK are both public now; the SDK authenticates with a service API key issued against the business account, so the account is still the gate. The maintainer’s stated build order (as of 2026-06-30) was API → SDK → MCP server / agent skill; the first two have shipped and no MCP server is documented yet.
Quick start
Install the official TypeScript SDK — @ambosstech/payments on npm (MIT, Node 18.18+) — and authenticate with a service API key from your business account. Amboss describes it as wrapping the payments GraphQL API in a fully typed client: typed clients for environments, wallets, and transactions, plus built-in webhook verification (HMAC). Receiving is createReceive, which returns a BOLT11 payment_request; sending goes to a BOLT11 invoice or a Lightning Address. Full reference at docs.amboss.tech/payments and docs.amboss.tech/sdk. The raw GraphQL API is available directly if you would rather not take the dependency.
Gotchas
- Stablecoin legs are issuer-freezable. USDT and USDC are issued by Tether and Circle, which can freeze or blacklist balances regardless of who holds the keys — self-custody of a freezable asset is not the same as censorship-resistance. The BTC leg carries none of that.
- Self-custody is described as an option, not a guarantee. “No mandatory custody transfer” implies custody is configurable; managed convenience tiers may hold more trust.
- Compliance screening is part of the stack. OFAC channel screening and IP node screening are integrated underneath, and Amboss sells that layer as its own product — see Reflex.
- The SDK is public, but the account is not optional. Authentication is a service API key issued against a business account, so there is no account-free machine path: an agent cannot go from “found it” to “paid it” without a human opening an account first.
- Fast-moving surface.
@ambosstech/paymentsreached 1.0.0 on 2026-08-07, seven weeks after its first publish and one day after 0.3.0. Expect it to keep moving, and pin the version.