Tutorial: Custodial Nostr Zapping with Coinos.io, NWC and Amethyst

Background

The free Alby account is going away by Jan 3rd 2025. With this users have options to switch to either self hosted Alby Hub or hosted Alby Hub for 21k sats per month (see https://albyhub.com/).

Unfortunatelly neither of these options work for me.

• I'm currently traveling a lot without a single base home, so I can't just run some server "at home" and I want to be able to use it even when I'm in the midst of moving between locations.
• 21k sats/month for Alby Hub is too steep just for using it for Nostr zaps. I'd pay more for the service than what I ever get in zaps. I'm happy to support projects, but the math just doesn't work out.
• Running lightning node, etc in VPS is also prohibitively expensive for this usecase, but I may end up eventually doing this for other reasons. Getting VPS strong enough for self hosted node is around $80/month, but there are also options like https://nodana.io/ for $10/month. (Shill me better options if you have)

If there is a way to run a selft-custodial solution with these requirements (i.e. no "home" node, cheap for small amount zapping), let me know, otherwise this will do and we'll have to wait for BOLT12 in lnd.

Tutorial

So here's the plan

• Get coinos.io account
• Connect it with Amethyst via NWC
• Install Alby Go to make it easier to use the account on the go

Here are the steps to do on your Android phone. iOS will be similar

• Get Amethyst nostr app installed
• Go to https://coinos.io/ , register new account and sign in.
• On the main screen click on the settings gear icon and get the connection code
• Reveal and copy the connection strings (tap on Copy)
• Open Amethyst and hold the lightning icon under any post
• Tap the "paste" button (see the screenshot)
• Now click on Save and that's it
• Zapping should now work natively in Amethyst and it will use the hosted wallet

Optional

• One extra thing you can do here is to install Alby Go (https://albygo.com/) and use the same "connection string" to connect it to your coinos.io account. This way you will have a mobile native wallet that's connected to this account (which makes it easier to pay with it, etc)

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/808573