Rizful: Get an Instant Lightning Node

🏠 Your home base for⚡zaps.  🚀 High-performance.  🕙 Online 24/7.    🚮 Disposable.  ⛓️‍💥 No big tech.   💡 Built for education.  ✨ Ready to use.    Nostr wallet connect.   📱💻 Use any device.

Rizful in 30 seconds...

Rizful is useful for...

#1. A reliable 🏠 Home for ⚡zaps...

Got a Lightning wallet on your phone? Awesome! But for getting zaps and other Lightning payments, you should also have your own lightning node, running in the ☁️ cloud. Rizful nodes can run 24/7, with laser-fast networking and high uptime, so you never miss a payment. And Rizful nodes are fully-featured: you'll get superpowers like instant inbound capacity, and the ability to open and close your own channels.

#2. Running a 🚮 temporary node...

The Lightning Network, used correctly, can be powerful for privacy. And Rizful nodes are designed to be disposable. Need to move some satoshis, privately and securely? Spin up a node in seconds. Get inbound. Open channels, close channels, or allow other nodes to open channels to you. When you're done, quickly close all your channels, withdraw your funds, and delete the node.

#3. Getting 🚀 inbound, real fast...

Getting inbound capacity is a common problem for new Lightning nodes. Rizful makes it super-easy, and instantly fast, to get inbound capacity.

#4. ⛓️‍💥 Breaking the shackles of Big Tech...

Big tech, and their buddies in the banking and credit card industries, want you to be trapped in their "walled garden," where you're forced to give up your data and allow surveillance of all your activity. Rizful is 100% web-based and doesn't require Apple or Google's permission. And we don't accept credit cards!

#5. Trying out Nostr Wallet Connect...

Nostr Wallet Connect is a new and experimental protocol for connecting Lightning Nodes with apps and websites. Rizful fully implements the specification. Be careful with "send & receive" NWC connections -- only use "send & receive" connections with apps and websites you trust.

#6. Getting a 📨 Lightning address...

Get an @rizful.com Lightning address that you can use to receive payments. The Lightning address standard isn't perfect, but it is widely supported and works well with Rizful.

#7. 💡 Educating new users about the Lightning Network...

Rizful is designed for use in the classroom. Get your students started immediately with their own nodes. Use the extensive (and entertaining) inline help to gradually introduce Lightning's concepts, as they use their node.

#8. 🤓 Learning how Lightning works, one step at a time...

If you're just getting started with Lightning, you can peruse our stimulating discussions on subjects like invoices, detailed node data, and fiat currencies.

#9. Tracking ⏳ long-lived operations...

Many operations on the Lightning Network have a confusing property: Sometimes they are super-fast, and sometimes they take forever. This makes it hard to give users a consistent and understandable experience. We've done the work to track "operations in progress" in a way that makes sense to both new users and experienced node-runners.

#10. Seeing detailed 📊 node data...

You can see detailed transaction data, channel data, and other vitals about your node directly from the History menu. Rizful doesn't hide anything from you: You've got a full node, and you can learn a lot just by making a few transactions and looking at the data those transactions produce.

#11. 🏃‍♀️ Running a node with low-latency, highly-available networking...

Running your own node, on your own hardware, is definitely cool. If you're technically minded, we recommend this tutorial for running your own LND node in Docker. But there is a well-known problem: Most individuals' home internet connections are not well suited for running a Lightning node. Home networks often go offline. Home computers often sleep, or are turned off at the wrong time. In comparison: Rizful nodes are hosted in the cloud and are optimized for low-latency, 24/7/365 connectivity.

#12. Accessing your node from any 📱💻 device...

Rizful runs in a web browser, and will work well on any reasonably modern device. iPhone, iPad, Android, Linux, Mac, Windows, Chromebook -- Rizful works well on both small screens and big screens.

#13. ✨ Instantly starting a new node...

New users, even if they are technical, are impatient. It's no fun to sign up for a service, and then wait 30 minutes while your node is syncing. Rizful nodes are all "pre-warmed" and ready to go right away -- no syncing required! You can literally open a channel and start sending satoshis within a few seconds of signing up for Rizful.

#14. Making 🦉 smart decisions about on-chain transactions...

Without guidance, it's easy to do the wrong thing with on-chain transactions. Ever withdrawn the wrong amount of on-chain BTC, leaving a tiny balance that could not be moved? Ever opened a Lightning channel that was too small to economically close? Rizful has you covered, with lots of validations and suggestions to keep you on the right track.

#15. Running Lightning on 🏗️ Testnet4 (coming soon™)...

Critical for education, Rizful is built from the ground-up to support testnet. But in the last few months, testnet3 has become unusable. Testnet4 compatibility in Rizful is coming in early 2025.

#16. Minting, sending, and trading 🐸 Taproot Assets (coming soon™)...

Taproot assets is the new standard for assets and stablecoins that works today, without any changes to Bitcoin consensus rules. Rizful is designed from the ground-up for compatibility with Taproot Assets, and is made by the team behind the Taproot Asset Explorer.

#17. Getting a 🌏 public URI and Nostr key...

Each Rizful node comes with a public URI, which (if you want) will allow any other node on the network to connect to your node, and open channels. Each node also comes with a Nostr public/private key pair, for integrating with the decentralized web.

RECOMMENDED: Use our Nostr Onboarding Guide to get your Rizful Node and your Nostr identity set up simultaneously.

But please...

Don't use Rizful for large amounts...

Always keep significant amounts of BTC offline, in a self-custody hardware wallet. Never trust websites, exchanges, or apps with high balances.

Understand Rizful's security model...

Two-factor authentication, using Google Authenticator (or similar) is required for all Rizful users with balances above 100,000 satoshis. This is a powerful and widely-tested security strategy that should serve to keep bad actors out of your Rizful node.

But please understand the tradeoffs we've made: While studying the Lightning design space, we've realized there is a big, nasty problem with giving users a seed phrase and assuming they could restore their node at any time: Most users won't be able to successfully restore their node! Lightning's "static channel backup" restore model is confusing, even for experienced node-runners. Do "an SCB" wrong, and you'll lose all your sats. We think that giving new users a seed phrase, and asking them to take responsibility for all backup and restore.... that's a challenging route. So we've made a big tradeoff: We store the encrypted backups and retain the ability to restore nodes in the event of hardware failure. This should work well for new users and users with small balances, but is NOT designed for large production-scale nodes with high balances.

Don't expect an "abstracted" Lightning experience...

A common recent pattern is for apps and websites to attempt to "hide" the actual behavior of the Lightning Network -- instead of showing lightning channels, peers, and channel balances, an "abstracted" app might just show one "satoshis balance," and not even show the user anything called a "channel". This can be a good approach, but we've decided with Rizful to try the opposite: We provide ALL the data, directly from the underlying node instance, with the aim of providing a detailed, fully-annotated "teaching" node, that is also high-performance.

Who made Rizful?

Rizful was created by the team behind The Megalith Node, one of the biggest public routing nodes on the Lightning Network. We have a lot of experience running high-performance, high-uptime nodes, and we've built LSPs (Lightning Service Providers) for some of the bigger players in Lightning. Rizful is the result of combining this Lightning expertise with about 10 years of prior experience running high-traffic software-as-a-service websites.

Is Rizful free?

Rizful is "almost free". Let's look at the three potential places you could spend sats on Rizful:

When you start up a node...

We wanted this to be totally free, but the danger is that bad actors could run automated scripts to spin up thousands of nodes, clogging up our servers. So currently we require a tiny payment of 250 satoshis ($0.25) to start a node.

When you get an inbound channel...

Rizful inbound channels are real lightning channels which tie up our capital, so we need to charge for them. You totally do NOT need to get an inbound channel from Rizful -- you could open your own channels, instead. The pricing varies based on current prevailing on-chain fees, since opening a Lightning channels requires an on-chain transaction. Given reasonably good network conditions -- like 6 sat/vbyte or 8 sat/vbyte -- you'll pay about 15,000 satoshis ($14.90) to open a channel of 500,000 satoshis in size.

When you get Guaranteed Uptime...

Rizful nodes, by default, will "go to sleep" after a significant period of inactivity. If you want your node to run 24/7, for example, to support inbound payments for many months or years, you can pay a fee to prevent it from sleeping. Currently, this fee is 20,000 satoshis ($19.87) for a month, 75,000 satoshis ($74.51) for six months, or 125,000 satoshis ($124.19) for a year.

Rizful in an education setting

The Lightning Network is growing, and, in the coming years, we will need hundreds of thousands of developers and business people who understand how it works, and how to use it.

Nearly everyone who has taken the time to try to understand how the Lightning Network works has discovered the same thing: The behavior of the network is complex, but once you start running your own node, you quickly get to a point where you "understand how it works."

We envision the following education use case for Rizful: A semester-long course for learners aged 15 and above, including those in secondary education, higher education, or adult learning programs.

Each student sits with a laptop, Chromebook, or tablet. (Rizful is entirely web-based, so any device will work.) Each student signs up for Rizful, and starts his/her own Rizful node, running on Testnet4.

The class begins with each student visiting a Testnet4 faucet, where they freely acquire Testnet4 tokens (tBTC).

The instructor then begins with the basics of Bitcoin -- onchain deposits, withdrawals, transaction fees, and block confirmations. For every lesson, there is a direct "practical exercise".

For example, while learning about deposits and withdrawals, the associated "practical exercise" would be: Each student depositing tBTC into their node from a tBTC faucet, choosing a random classmate, and sending an on-chain transaction to that classmate's Rizful node. Both students then watch that transaction on a block explorer until the transaction is confirmed.

Moving on to Lighting, separate modules will cover opening channels, closing channels, sending payments, receiving payments, and more. Rizful exposes a TON of data about EVERY transaction, so this is where the class could go into detail, and discuss the data produced by each user's node (shown in Rizful's history menu.)

"Practical exercises" for this section will be actually performing each action on the Lightning Network: open channel, close channel, make invoice, pay invoice, etc.

Finally, a module on NOSTR: Students set up Rizful Nostr Wallet Connect connections to few recommended apps and websites, and experiment with NOSTR. This is where Testnet4 usage might get challenging, so at this point each student might need a "mainchain" node, maybe with one Lightning channel, and 1,000 satoshis of outbound capacity.

Overall, this will be a very inexpensive to run and very hands-on course of study. For each student, it will build confidence around BTC on-chain, Lightning Network, and NOSTR operations and theory.