Which Lightning wallet should your tip jar use?
Mia streams on Friday nights. Someone tips 5,000 sats and types "for the new mic". The sats arrive in her wallet. Her stream alert stays silent, the tipper's screen never says Paid ✓, and her tip record stays empty.
Nothing is broken. She just picked the wallet everyone recommends.
Ask which Lightning wallet to take tips with and the usual answer is Wallet of Satoshi. It's a good wallet. You get a Lightning address in a minute, and every tip sent to it arrives. But it can't tell a tip page that a tip arrived, so the page never knows.
That's the one thing to check when you choose a wallet for tips, and wallet reviews rarely mention it. They're written for people spending bitcoin, not for people receiving it.
What matters in a wallet for tips
- It confirms payments. Your tip page can ask the wallet whether a tip has arrived, and get an answer. This is LUD-21, explained below.
- It carries the tipper's name. A tip can come with a short note, which a tip jar uses for the tipper's name. This is LUD-12.
- It gives you a Lightning address. Something like you@coinos.io. It's what your tip page is built on.
- It receives when your phone is off. A wallet that only runs on your phone can miss a tip while the app is closed. A wallet that holds the sats for you, or runs on a server that's always on, won't.
What LUD-21 is
When someone tips through a page, the page asks your wallet for an invoice and shows it as a QR code. The tipper's wallet pays it. The proof of payment goes back to the tipper's wallet, not to the page. So the page has to ask your wallet: has this one been paid?
LUD-21 is the Lightning standard for that question. LUDs are the numbered specs behind Lightning addresses: LUD-16 is the address itself, LUD-12 is the note that carries a name, and LUD-21 is payment confirmation. A wallet that follows LUD-21 hands over a verify link with every invoice. The page checks that link, and the moment your wallet says the invoice is settled, the tipper sees Paid ✓.
A wallet without it still receives every tip. What you lose is everything that depends on knowing a tip arrived:
- Paid ✓ on the tipper's screen, so they know it worked.
- Your record of tips, with names, to check or download.
- Stream alerts, which fire when a tip lands.
- Split pay between staff, which has to know one tip landed before it sends the next tipper to the next person.
Which wallets do both
We don't copy this from anyone's docs. Our server asks each wallet for a tiny invoice, which expires unpaid, and records what comes back: whether there's a verify link, and how long a note the wallet accepts.
| Wallet | Confirms payments (LUD-21) | Carries the tipper's name (LUD-12) |
|---|---|---|
| Coinos | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes, up to 512 characters |
| Speed | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes, up to 255 characters |
| Blink | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes, up to 255 characters |
| Alby | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes, up to 255 characters |
| Stacker News | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes, up to 1,000 characters |
| Wallet of Satoshi | ✗ No | ✓ Yes, up to 255 characters |
| Strike | ✗ No | ✓ Yes, up to 200 characters |
| ZBD | ✗ No | ✓ Yes, up to 150 characters |
| Bitrefill | ✗ No | ✗ No |
| npub.cash | ✗ No | ✗ No |
Wallets change. The live table re-checks a wallet once its answer is a month old, and it has a box to check any Lightning address, including yours.
Which one to pick
For a counter. Speed or Blink. Both confirm payments and carry names, both hold the sats for you so a tip never waits on your phone, and both are built with shops and stalls in mind. Blink began as the Bitcoin Beach wallet, made for a town in El Salvador where shops took bitcoin day to day.
For a stream or a creator page. Coinos or Alby. Coinos takes the longest names of the lot, so a tipper can say more than their name, and you can sign up with just a username. Alby is at home on Nostr, if that's where your audience is.
For a team on split pay. Any wallet with a ✓ in the first column, for every person on the team. Split pay can only move to the next person once it knows the last tip landed.
If you want to hold your own keys. Alby Hub runs your own Lightning node and gives you an Alby Lightning address that pays straight into it. It confirms payments like the others. The node has to be running to receive, so either keep the device it's on switched on, or let Alby host it for you.
If you already use Wallet of Satoshi. Your tips arrive, and your tip page works. You just won't see Paid ✓, a record or alerts. If you want those, open one of the wallets above and change the Lightning address on your jar. If you've claimed a short link, every poster and bio link keeps working.
Coinos, Speed, Blink and the other hosted wallets hold the sats for you until you move them. That's fine for tips, which arrive a few thousand sats at a time. When they add up, send them to a wallet where you hold the keys.
Setting one up
Paste your Lightning address at bitcointipjar.com and you have a tip page, a QR code and a print-ready poster. Tips go straight to your wallet, and the page tells you straight away whether your wallet confirms payments. For the rest of the setup, see how to make a bitcoin tip jar, and for why the amounts on it matter, why your bitcoin tip jar needs preset amounts.