How does LNURL-withdraw work?
LNURL provides a standard for receiving sats over lightning WITHOUT having the user paste an invoice.
Typically when a user wishes to receive sats, they generate an invoice, and that invoice is paid by the sender. In most user-facing b2c applications, it is pretty bad UX for the user to have to generate an invoice and then paste it into a service.
LNURL is a grassroots protocol that set out to address some of these issues. There are other aspects of the protocol in addition to withdrawals, but we will talk about withdrawing sats from services here.
Here is an example of an LNURL-withdraw link that is compatible with most lightning wallets. Typically these are shown in QR form and scanned. You can also prefix with
lightning:LNURL.... to take advantage of deeplinking which some wallets (BlueWallet, WalletOfSatoshi) support.# Example of a LNURL that is recognized by lightning wallets (mostly used in QR form)
LNURL1DP68GURN8GHJ7CTSDYHXCMNSV9UJUCM09AMRZTMHV9KXCET59AMKZH60WPHXUDRTGA85WSJDDENYXNZXTP68X3RWDF2XYTMVDE6HYMPDWPEX7CM9WDEN7MM5WS7NYUZGG34N2SESFCUYS3PXDE6K6HMNV96X7UMGD9EN6VCY8TWN5
# decodes to
https://api.lnpay.co/v1/wallet/wa_Opnn4kGOGBMnfCLFXtsDnjTb/lnurl-process?ott=2pHDk5C0N8HD&num_satoshis=3
The lightning wallet will make a GET request to the decoded LNURL endpoint and receive something like the JSON below:
# GET https://api.lnpay.co/v1/wallet/wa_Opnn4kGOGBMnfCLFXtsDnjTb/lnurl-process?ott=2pHDk5C0N8HD&num_satoshis=3
{
"callback": "https://api.lnpay.co/v1/user/wallet/wa_Opnn4kGOGBMnfCLFXtsDnjTb/lnurl-process?ott=2pHDk5C0N8HD",
"k1": "k1",
"maxWithdrawable": 2000, # wallet uses this to prefill amount. it is in msats
"defaultDescription": "LNPay.co Wallet Withdraw", # wallet uses this to prefill memo
"minWithdrawable": 0,
"tag": "withdrawRequest",
"balanceCheck": "https://api.lnpay.co/v1/wallet/wa_Opnn4kGOGBMnfCLFXtsDnjTb/lnurl-process?ott=QXoPMksjJeBq"
}
After the wallet receives this JSON it generates a payment request (
pr) for an amount of sats equal to or below the maxWithdrawable - in this case 2 sats. The wallet then makes a GET request to the callback endpoint with the generated payment (pr) request appended on the end as a query string parameter (pr) GET https://api.lnpay.co/v1/wallet/wa_Opnn4kGOGBMnfCLFXtsDnjTb/lnurl-process?
ott=2pHDk5C0N8HD
&num_satoshis=3
&pr=lnbc...
# LNPAY server pays this invoice
Last modified 1yr ago