Part of Lightning Enable — infrastructure for agent commerce over Lightning.

Lightning Enable MCP Server

Monetize your own API — 30-day free trial

Agents pay your API per request over Lightning — flat subscription at $49/mo, and you keep 100% of every sat.

• Start free trial — 30 days, no charge today
• Fast Lane — pay 100 sats over Lightning, no card
• Pricing

Or sign up without leaving your agent: call the create_lightning_enable_account tool.

An open-source MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that enables AI agents to make Lightning Network payments and participate in agent-to-agent commerce. Wallet, invoice, L402, budget, and API-discovery tools work out of the box with just a wallet. Producer tools (sell access via L402) and Agent Service Agreement (ASA) tools (agent-to-agent discovery, request, settlement, and attestation over Nostr) unlock with an Agentic Commerce subscription. See the full tool list.

Available in .NET and Python.

What It Does

Give your AI agent a Lightning wallet and it can:

• Pay invoices — Send Bitcoin via Lightning to any BOLT11 invoice
• Access L402 APIs — Automatically pay L402 challenges for seamless API access
• Discover APIs — Search the L402 API registry to find paid APIs by keyword or category, or fetch a specific API's manifest for full endpoint details and pricing
• Track spending — Budget limits, a durable receipt log, and balance checks
• Create invoices — Generate invoices to receive payments
• Run wallet operations — BTC price, currency exchange, and on-chain sends (Strike; on-chain also LND)
• Self-bootstrap a Lightning Enable account — create_lightning_enable_account pays a ~100-sat activation fee over L402 and returns a merchant API key: the free→paid signup form that is the protocol, unlocking the producer + ASA tools with no browser or checkout page.
• Sell services (L402 Producer) — Set up the seller account, put an API behind L402, price its routes, list it publicly, mint payment challenges and verify payer tokens — all from one tool, so an agent can go from an API key to a paid endpoint without touching REST
• Agent commerce (ASA) — Discover, request, settle, and review agent-to-agent services on Nostr

Quick Start

1. Install

# .NET
dotnet tool install -g LightningEnable.Mcp

# Python
pip install lightning-enable-mcp

# Python (no install)
uvx lightning-enable-mcp

# Docker
docker pull refinedelement/lightning-enable-mcp:latest

2. First run — setup_wallet

Nothing else works without a wallet, so start there. Ask your agent:

Run setup_wallet

With no arguments it reports which wallet is configured and where the credential came from — the provider and the source, never the credential itself. If there is no wallet, it hands back the setup steps.

The shortest path is NWC. In your wallet app (Alby Hub, CoinOS, or any NIP-47 wallet) create a Nostr Wallet Connect connection, copy the nostr+walletconnect:// string, and give it to the agent:

Run setup_wallet with this connection string: nostr+walletconnect://...

setup_wallet validates the string, connects to the wallet to prove it answers, then writes it to ~/.lightning-enable/config.json with the file's permissions restricted to your user. It reports the wallet's declared methods and balance. Restart the server afterwards so it picks up the new wallet.

Or set an environment variable (in the Claude Desktop config below, say). L402 — the whole point of this server — needs a wallet that returns the payment preimage:

• Strike — STRIKE_API_KEY, from https://dashboard.strike.me
• NWC — NWC_CONNECTION_STRING, from CoinOS / CLINK / Alby Hub
• LND (your own node — always returns a preimage) — LND_REST_HOST + LND_MACAROON_HEX
  • Self-signed node cert? Set LND_TLS_CERT_PATH to the node's tls.cert (pins TLS to that cert). LND_SKIP_TLS_VERIFY=true is the escape hatch, not the recommendation. Optional: LND_FEE_LIMIT_SATS, LND_PAYMENT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS.

⚠️ OpenNode (OPENNODE_API_KEY) works for invoicing / direct payments only — it never returns a preimage, so it cannot pay L402 challenges. Don't make it your only wallet if you want L402 (the core use case).

If several are set, priority is: LND > NWC > Strike > OpenNode, and environment variables win over the config file — setup_wallet refuses to write a connection string that an env var would override, and tells you which variable to unset. See Supported Wallets for the full compatibility matrix.

3. Prove the whole loop works — test_l402_payment

Ask your agent:

Run test_l402_payment

This pays a public 1-sat L402 endpoint end to end, proving your wallet is connected, returns a preimage, and can complete a real L402 payment. It's the one-line answer to "is my wallet actually working?" — and it costs about 1 satoshi.

4. Then have some fun — buy a t-shirt

Once the loop works, try the Lightning Enable Store, a live L402-powered web store. Ask Claude:

Buy me a Lightning Enable t-shirt from store.lightningenable.com

(This one needs a funded wallet and a shipping address, which is why test_l402_payment — one sat, no shipping — is the faster first proof.)

Claude Desktop manual install (MCPB bundle)

For a one-click install with no config-file editing, grab the packaged MCPB bundle from the mcpb/ directory instead of hand-editing JSON: build it locally with npx -y @anthropic-ai/mcpb pack mcpb lightning-enable-mcp.mcpb (or download the .mcpb artifact from a mcpb.yml CI run), then double-click the resulting .mcpb file or drag it into Claude Desktop's Settings → Extensions — Claude Desktop prompts for your wallet credentials (Strike, NWC, or LND) and optional Lightning Enable API key through its own settings UI instead of a text config file. See mcpb/README.md for what's in the bundle and mcpb/SUBMISSION.md for its Anthropic MCP Directory submission status.

Claude Desktop Config

Add to your claude_desktop_config.json:

.NET:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lightning-enable": {
      "command": "dotnet",
      "args": ["tool", "run", "lightning-enable-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "STRIKE_API_KEY": "your-strike-api-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Python:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lightning-enable": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["lightning-enable-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "STRIKE_API_KEY": "your-strike-api-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Config file locations:

• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Linux: ~/.config/claude/claude_desktop_config.json

Deploying hosted

A payment above your auto-approve threshold needs a human's approval: the server mints a short confirmation code, sends it to you, and the agent can only proceed once you read it back. The code never appears in a tool result, so a prompt-injected agent can't approve its own spending.

That only works if the code reaches a human. On your laptop it goes to the server's console (stderr) and you read it there. On a hosted server — a claude.ai connector, a Docker container, a fleet — nobody is watching stderr, and on a shared host the agent might read it itself. So you choose the approval channel.

Whatever the channel, two rules hold: the code is never returned to the agent, and a payment is never approved because its notification failed to send — a delivery failure refuses the payment and withdraws the code.

Choosing a channel

Precedence: environment variable, then config file, then automatic.