Bringin Bitcoin to Retail Banking with the Breez SDK
Like many things, payments take the path of least resistance. One of fiat’s few remaining advantages is that banks prefer it, and most people need banks. Reducing the friction between bitcoin and banks would automatically channel more payments over Lightning, bringing bitcoin on par with fiat.
Bringin lets Lightning interact with fiat seamlessly, which puts the two currency models on a level playing field, and it’s possible thanks to the Breez SDK. The idea, which was always inevitable, is to plug Lightning into the existing banking infrastructure of IBANs and SEPA. As a result, merchants can accept bitcoin with instant settlement, it enables MiCA-compliant on- and off-ramps for bitcoin, and companies can pay their employees in bitcoin, all with only minimal KYC and fees. When banks and regulators look at Bringin, they see fiat, but underneath it’s all Lightning.
This kind of Lightning ↔ fiat interoperability is something we all wish we had had back in 2019. So why did we have to wait until 2024??
Because Prashanth wasn’t ready to change the world just yet.
Bringin the Change You Wish to See in the World
Following the pattern of many innovators, Prashanth — Bringin’s founder and CEO — built the solution to his own problem. He has a long love affair with bitcoin, and until 2022 he had been working on a custodial bitcoin payment app. Not only did that venture stumble over regulatory hurdles, but Prashanth was still forced to live on the euros he was being paid in because the banks were wary of dealing with bitcoin and exchanges. He was working to realize his dream of a circular economy, but was being forced to live on fiat (and having his paycheck processed over days or weeks was making even that difficult).
So he refocused his effort on developing a solution that would erase the seams between fiat and bitcoin. But despite his passion for bitcoin, Prashanth is a pragmatist. If the point is to convert the masses, we’re better off giving them a solution that works than lecturing them about issues like privacy and UTXOs that most don’t care about anyway. His approach is not “if you can’t beat ’em, join ‘em;” it’s more like “first join ’em, then beat ‘em.”
Prashanth was looking for an easy, off-the-shelf means of onboarding users to Lightning rapidly and at scale. Finding one would let him focus on the fiat plumbing of IBANs and conversion.
The Breez SDK ticked all the boxes. The simple, modular design allows for quick and easy implementation, and the open-LSP model provides the liquidity to onboard users as quickly as he can find them. With the Breez SDK, the Lightning side of the equation is effectively solved.
Reducing Complexity with the Breez SDK
All the functions Bringin needed for its Lightning operations were already built into the Breez SDK, just waiting to be plugged in: remote, self-custodial Greenlight nodes; making and receiving payments; LNURL; swapping in and out from the blockchain; connecting to an LSP; fiat conversion — the works.
Of course, liquidity is bound to be a major issue for any service processing payments at the scale of banks. With the open-LSP model built into the Breez SDK, liquidity is no longer an issue. “LSPs are the solution that works.” According to Prashanth, the combination of remote nodes and open-LSPs in the Breez SDK “solves 80% of the problems” Bringin needed to overcome. “It’s a no-brainer.”
Beyond the raw functionality of our SDK, Prashanth was also impressed with the thorough documentation and quick, helpful support. You can tell the model works because Bringin was able to promote their closed beta to a market-ready product within just four months.
With the Bringin production release, users and merchants are able to receive BTC and have it deposited in their IBAN-equipped euro accounts within a minute for a 1% fee. KYC is minimal. Users can do it over a link supplied in the app.
A seamless interface between Lightning and fiat bank accounts has been the holy grail of user experience since the dawn of Lightning, and now all of Europe can drink from it thanks to Bringin and the Breez SDK.
Bringin Is a Bridge Meant to Be Crossed
Bringin still has ambitious goals on their roadmap. The next milestones will be to expand the palette of merchant tools, like the ability to keep a preset amount of btc always on the node in self-custody. The perfect complement to multiple accounts and balances would, of course, be more refined accounting tools for merchants. And if users can receive bitcoin as if it were fiat, why not give them a physical card that they can top up and use wherever they would use fiat, just like their conventional debit cards?
Lightning-enabled debit cards? The technology is reaching an interesting phase of its development. It’s easy to revert to excuses when a technology — or any kind of personal or technological growth — isn’t happening fast enough. “I want to lose weight, but there’s no point in starting a diet before the holidays.” “We’ll achieve the next two orders of magnitude as soon as we shave 30% off the weight of our widgets.” The obstacles that have been holding Lightning back are disappearing like shitcoins in a bear market.
The technology is maturing, the market is maturing, and so are the companies building and spreading Lightning solutions. Bringin is building a bridge across the chasm that has separated the circular bitcoin economy from the mainstream fiat economy, and the Breez SDK is its central pillar.
