Projects

Orchard: Your Sovereign Bank in Cyberspace

Cashu

30 Jul 2026 — 4 min read

Orchard is a self-hosted, free and open-source web application built to simplify mint management. Running a typical Cashu mint involves a full Bitcoin node, a Lightning node, and the mint service itself. Orchard connects them all into an interface to give operators a universal command center.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

If you've ever run a Bitcoin or Lightning node, you've probably installed a handful of companion applications: mempool explorers, management GUIs, analytics tools, etc. These tools unlock more value from your infrastructure by extending features and transforming opaque and isolated system daemons into accessible web apps.

When we were running our first Cashu mints, the void of options like this was painfully clear. Answering simple questions became a tedious task: What's my balance? What happened to this payment? There simply was no off-the-shelf tool. So, we built it.

The Sovereign Bank Today

Setup Flexibility

There are two well-supported mint implementations you can choose from today, and they both support many Lightning backends. Orchard maintains this flexibility for operators, so you can bring along whatever you happen to run.

Lightning nodes: LND, Core Lightning
Mints: Nutshell, cdk-mintd

Unified Command Center

Bitcoin, Lightning, and Cashu all converge here so you can get a quick status report of every layer in your stack. Every integration is optional in Orchard. Just connect your mint, or connect all three to unlock features across the application.

Bitcoin info and mempool data
Block height clock
Sovereign Bitcoin price oracle with USD conversions for every transaction (UTXOracle)
Lightning info, hot wallet summary, and channel balances
Asset-side accounting in the mint's balance sheet (Lightning liquidity)

Mint Management

The mint section is the oldest and most mature grove in the Orchard. The views and tools within aim to give operators everything they need to maintain a healthy mint:

Mint dashboard for at-a-glance status and rich time-series trends
Public info and mint configuration changes
Keyset lifecycles and rotation tools
Database exploration for troubleshooting events and downloading backups
Mint system metrics to surface anomalies, bottlenecks, and errors

Invite Your Crew

You don't have to go alone. You can add users to your Orchard instance using simple invite codes, with clear roles for controlling permissions. Each Orchard gets one admin, and any number of managers and read-only users.

Event Logs

Every action in Orchard gets logged and tagged with who made the change, what changed, when it occurred, and the success or error message. This gives you a complete audit trail of operations so you're never in the dark.

Your Bitcoin Agent

AI features inside Orchard come alive once you connect an inference engine. Once enabled and configured, AI can be used in two ways:

Groundskeeper agent: Runs scheduled jobs and is reachable via Telegram.
Context-aware assistants: Control the UI with natural language.

Privacy guides many of our development decisions, including avoiding third-party APIs by default, supporting Tor proxies, and calculating price conversions locally. AI is no different, so the harness in Orchard is optimized for local inference using smaller models.

Ollama: Local models on your own hardware
OpenRouter: Cloud-hosted models, payable with Bitcoin

The Groundskeeper is your personal 24/7 on-site engineer. You configure what tools it can access and define the custom jobs it runs. It can send you regular reports about system health or alerts about issues. And it's always reachable from your mobile phone whenever you have a question you need answered.

The Sovereign Bank of Tomorrow

The story isn't over. The Cashu ecosystem moves quickly, and Bitcoin, Lightning, and ecash tools still need to be built or expanded. Here are some of the things to look forward to: