Lightning Charge is Blockstream’s new micropayment processing system for the Lightning Network. It allows web developers to easily create Lightning Apps (LApps) to test Blockstream’s c-lightning implementation of the Lightning Network protocol. Since the release of Lightning Charge, we’ve been adding LApps to the Elements Project, including WooCommerce Lightning Gateway, a general webcommerce solution released earlier this year, and FileBazaar, a pay-per-view application released yesterday as the first in a new lineup of LApps.
We’re now announcing our second new LApp, Lightning Publisher for WordPress, a plug-in that can turn anyone into their own publisher by allowing them to collect payments when they share their writing or other blog content on a WordPress system. After an author powers up the LApp, readers will be able to preview an article on the blog, then can choose to access the full content by making a Lightning micropayment, which will be sent to the creator’s Lightning Charge server.
Like FileBazaar, Lightning Publisher for WordPress helps content creators to break away from the constraints of traditional advertising-based web revenue and instead sets them on their own paths to independently conduct business online. It also gives readers more control: they can buy just the articles they want, when they want them, by sending instant micropayments to the publishers of their choice.
We invite you to give the Lightning Publisher for WordPress a try. Use it to experiment with combining c-lightning and Lightning Charge on testnet to collect micropayments for content or services, in preparation for the c-lightning beta release; or test drive it to get a feel for how to use Lightning Charge. All that you need to get started is a testnet node, a Lightning Charge server, and the Lightning Publisher for WordPress LApp.