Coinbase jumped on the 402 bandwagon... yay!
When I talk to people about Cashu they usually ask me: "Why do we need Cashu? We got Bitcoin and Lightning". I used to tell them that Cashu offers a great alternative to custodial Lightning, but with better privacy. While this remains true, my answer today is that Cashu enables new use cases (or simplifies them drastically) where Lightning and Bitcoin struggle.
One example are Zaps. NIP-61 Zaps offer a very similar experience and value proposition as NIP-57 Zaps do, but require only a fraction of the implementation overhead.
The second example (and inspiration for this post) is HTTP 402. With Cashu, we can streamline payments for requested ressources into a single request. Because Cashu is a bearer asset the whole flow is pretty stateless. It is stupid simple to implement this. While it is definitely possible to make 402 work with other "assets", using Bitcoin / Cashu makes it a breez.
This is my favourite thing about Cashu.
Egge /
npub1mh…uc226
2025-05-07 08:47:11
Author Public Key
npub1mhcr4j594hsrnen594d7700n2t03n8gdx83zhxzculk6sh9nhwlq7uc226Published at
2025-05-07 08:47:11Event JSON
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"content": "Coinbase jumped on the 402 bandwagon... yay!\n\nWhen I talk to people about Cashu they usually ask me: \"Why do we need Cashu? We got Bitcoin and Lightning\". I used to tell them that Cashu offers a great alternative to custodial Lightning, but with better privacy. While this remains true, my answer today is that Cashu enables new use cases (or simplifies them drastically) where Lightning and Bitcoin struggle. \n\nOne example are Zaps. NIP-61 Zaps offer a very similar experience and value proposition as NIP-57 Zaps do, but require only a fraction of the implementation overhead. \n\nThe second example (and inspiration for this post) is HTTP 402. With Cashu, we can streamline payments for requested ressources into a single request. Because Cashu is a bearer asset the whole flow is pretty stateless. It is stupid simple to implement this. While it is definitely possible to make 402 work with other \"assets\", using Bitcoin / Cashu makes it a breez.\n\nThis is my favourite thing about Cashu.\n\n https://blossom.primal.net/b0798bba893532f8eea97928c329a7a78a94f866dd3b71949f32a805198d1752.mov ",
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