Skills · Payments

lightning-pay

Give an agent the ability to send and receive Lightning payments — create invoices, pay, check balance — without ever handing it the wallet's keys.

What it does

Wires Lightning payments into an agent over Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC, NIP-47) — the protocol that lets an app control a wallet remotely without holding its keys. The wallet signs; the agent holds only a scoped, revocable connection string. That keeps the agent’s attack surface tiny: a leaked string is budget-limited and can be revoked, where a leaked private key is total loss.

The skill is the Alby MCP server (@getalby/mcp), which exposes payment tools to any MCP-capable agent and also understands LNURL and L402, so it covers most of the ways an agent actually pays on the Lightning stack.

When to use it

• Any time an agent needs to pay (or invoice for) something in sats — the building block under discover-and-buy and most A2A commerce.
• When you want payment authority separated from custody — the agent can spend within a budget, but never holds the keys.
• When you’re already running an NWC wallet (Alby Hub or any NIP-47 wallet) and want to expose it to an MCP agent.

Install

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "alby": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@getalby/mcp"],
      "env": { "NWC_CONNECTION_STRING": "nostr+walletconnect://..." }
    }
  }
}

• MCP clients (Claude, Cursor, Hermes, n8n): the block above — it runs locally over stdio and reads the NWC string from the environment.
• OpenClaw / SKILL.md agents: wrap the same @getalby/mcp process, or call NWC directly with a NIP-47 library; the connection string is the only secret.
• Any agent: NWC is an open protocol — any NIP-47 client library works if you don’t want the MCP wrapper. See Alby & NWC and The Stack for how the protocol fits underneath.

Generate the connection string from Alby Hub (or any NWC wallet) with a spending budget and expiry, then point the server at it.

Use it

Typical tools the server exposes: create an invoice, pay an invoice (BOLT11), look up a payment, check balance, and pay an LNURL/Lightning address. A natural-language run: “Create a 1,000-sat invoice for this job,” or “Pay this BOLT11 if it’s under 500 sats, then confirm the balance.”

Verify

• Check balance — should return your wallet’s sats balance without error.
• Create a tiny invoice and confirm it parses as valid BOLT11.
• Optionally pay a 1-sat invoice to yourself to confirm the send path end to end.
• verify-setup folds this check into a full pre-flight.

Gotchas & safety

• Always budget and time-box the connection string. It is bearer authority up to its limit — treat it like a debit card with a cap, not like a key.
• Use @getalby/mcp, not the archived server. @getalby/nwc-mcp-server still runs from npm but its repo was archived (2025-06-20) and points users to @getalby/mcp, which adds LNURL + L402 support. Prefer the current package.
• The wallet is the trust anchor. This skill is only as self-custodial as the NWC wallet behind it — run your own (Alby Hub on your node) for full sovereignty, or accept the hub’s custody trade-off knowingly.