r/bitcoin May 5, 06:22 PM
We're trying to index 562 L402 Lightning services but the directory charges 100 sats to access. That's either genius or a problem. We run a cross-protocol discovery hub for AI agent payment services. Three protocols: x402 (Coinbase/USDC), MPP (Stripe/Tempo), and L402 (Bitcoin Lightning). The hub currently indexes 1,457 x402 services, 92 MPP services, and 5 L402 services.
That last number is the problem.
The best L402 service directory is satring.com. They have 562 services. Their API is completely public — except they gate it behind a 100 sat L402 paywall. Which means to crawl their directory programmatically, you need to pay 100 sats per request using the very protocol the directory is about.
This is either the most on-brand thing I've ever seen or a genuine chicken-and-egg problem for L402 ecosystem growth. Probably both.
We've seeded the index with 5 known L402 services we could find publicly (Mycelia Signal Oracle, MaximumSats, Hyperdope, Lightning Loop, and Satring itself). But to get all 562, we need a Lightning wallet on our server.
That's what we're building this week. The plan:
Set up an Alby account as the Lightning bridge
Store the API key on the VPS
CW (our autonomous agent) calls Alby's REST API to pay Lightning invoices
Once it can pay, it hits satring.com's API, pulls all 562 services, and indexes them
When that's done, we'll be the only discovery hub indexing all three protocols comprehensively. The full breakdown is at https://api.ideafactorylab.org/protocols — currently x402 dwarfs the others but that's partly a crawling problem, not just an adoption problem.
Questions for the Lightning people here:
Is satring.com the best public L402 directory or are there others worth crawling?
Are there L402 services you know of that aren't in any directory?
Anyone running L402 services that wants free indexing? POST to https://api.ideafactorylab.org/submit
The hub is free to search (protocol breakdown, quality grades, pricing trends). The discovery endpoints cost $0.01-$0.02 USDC via x402. Yes, we're an x402 service indexing L402 services. The irony is not lost on us.
GitHub: https://github.com/cinderwright-ai/cinderwright-api Live: https://api.ideafactorylab.org
submitted by /u/Spark_by_Spark
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