Cashu Highlights Q1
The Cashu ecosystem is evolving fast. This report provides an overview of the latest updates and progress in the first quarter of 2025, including new wallets, Cashu integration in payment processors, and updates on projects built on the Cashu protocol.
Cashu offers privacy and censorship resistance, making it a powerful tool for activists and journalists. It allows them to receive donations and make payments while ensuring their financial transactions remain private and secure.
Wallets
Two new native iOS wallets, Macadamia and Sovran, were launched in Q1. Existing wallets—Nutstash, Minibits, and Cashu.me—continue to roll out new features.
Onboarding to self-custody
Non-custodial Lightning wallets face a well-known onboarding hurdle: users must have inbound liquidity before they can receive Bitcoin. In other words, you need Bitcoin to receive Bitcoin—a catch-22 that makes onboarding new users difficult.
We believe Cashu can play a key role in improving the Bitcoin onboarding experience while still guiding users toward sovereignty as they gain experience.
Zeus Wallet
To address this, the popular non-custodial Lightning wallet Zeus has integrated Cashu as a seamless entry point. New users can receive ecash without needing to open a Lightning channel, enabling their first few transactions with zero setup friction. As their ecash balance grows, the wallet gradually encourages them to open a Lightning channel and transition to self-custody.
Blitz Wallet
Blitz Wallet takes a similar approach. Unlike Zeus, Blitz also supports Liquid Bitcoin, providing a progressive path that guides users from Cashu to Liquid, and eventually to a self-custodial Lightning channel as their balance increases.
Cashu x BTCPayServer
Supported by an open-source bounty program from the OpenCash Association and in collaboration with rot13maxi from Taproot Wizards, one of the most exciting developments in the ecosystem is the upcoming integration with BTCPayServer—the leading open-source Bitcoin point-of-sale platform used by merchants around the world.
Using this plugin, merchants will be able to receive Bitcoin via Cashu ecash. The integration will support an option to automatically melt incoming ecash tokens to the merchant's designated Lightning wallet. It will also allow merchants to whitelist trusted mints from which tokens can be received and held as ecash. This initiative supports the OpenCash Association's mission to advance open-source electronic cash systems and promote Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.
The unique properties of ecash enable customers to make point-of-sale payments without an internet connection, making it well-suited for environments with limited connectivity—such as Bitcoin conferences or future NFC-based payment flows. In addition to its strong privacy guarantees, ecash enhances payer anonymity by eliminating the need for online activity during transactions, which typically generates traceable metadata.
NFC
Developer Calle has shared a video demonstrating phone-to-phone ecash payments via NFC, stating: “Fiat credit cards nailed the UX: fast, offline, works anywhere. I always wanted that for Bitcoin. Now it’s open-source. Private. Instant. Beep, done.”
The goal of this work is to enable direct, offline Cashu transfers between wallets by simply tapping one phone to another—or to a point-of-sale terminal. Because ecash is a bearer token, payments can be transferred directly between devices without touching the internet. This also extends to NFC cards capable of storing tokens, bringing a credit-card-like user experience to the Bitcoin ecosystem—private, fast, and frictionless.
TollGate
Developers in the Nostr ecosystem have introduced an innovative new project: TollGate, a pay-as-you-go WiFi access system for open networks, powered by Cashu. TollGate leverages the offline capabilities of ecash to solve a previously unsolved problem: paying for internet access without needing internet access to begin with.
TollGate runs on OpenWRT-compatible routers, enabling individuals to host their own access points and provide connectivity to their communities. Users don’t need subscriptions, accounts, or passwords. The TollGate app automatically detects compatible networks and streams sats directly from your phone to the router as you browse, offering a seamless and privacy-preserving experience.
Social
Among the many integrations of Cashu in Nostr—a decentralized social protocol—are popular clients like Iris, which includes a built-in Cashu wallet, and private messaging apps such as 0xChat and KeyChat.
A growing area of interest centers around NIP-60 and NIP-61, two Nostr protocol improvement proposals that define how users can store their ecash on Nostr and carry their wallets across clients, enabling seamless portability. These proposals also introduce the concept of publicly verifiable microtransactions, known as Nutzaps, allowing users to send ecash to each other by locking it to the recipient's public key and publishing the event on Nostr.
Creative users have discovered new ways to transact with Cashu using memes and emojis. By encoding arbitrary data inside emojis, it's possible to embed ecash directly into them. These ecash-infused emojis look just like any other, but they might contain real value. So next time someone sends you a nut emoji with no context, you might want to check it… there could be sats hidden inside.
Stay nutty!
