Meet The Bolt Card, an NFC-enabled Lightning card

[nullama]

CoinCorner has created an interesting product. A physical card that you can use to tap to pay via lightning in person.



This video explains how you can link your card to the CoinCorner app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXx6HhzTi0w

A store that has BTCPayServer can accept payments via NFC, which means they can accept payments with this card, as you can see in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SuhEPSMRoA

You can create a giftcard and then just hand them to anyone, who can then receive the sats with any wallet. This is basically a lightning version of the opendime, as you can see in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffvPRk6KdA4

They're currently selling each card at £4.99(they give you a 50% discount if you are a user of CoinCorner) with a maximum of 21 per customer, and you need to use their app to fund it for use as a debit card. They offer free deposits and withdrawals using lightning.

You can also use the card without having an account with CoinCorner:

Q: Is the Bolt Card compatible with other Payment gateways/wallets?
A: Yes, The Bolt Card is compatible within current industry protocols, namely Lightning and LNURL, which means it's easy for other payment gateways to introduce the NFC capability to interact with The Bolt Card.

Q: I'm not a CoinCorner customer, can I still have a Bolt Card?
A: Yes! The Bolt Card is available to everyone but some features (e.g. debit card functionality) are only available to CoinCorner customers. Not yet a CoinCorner customer? Sign up today.

At the end of the day this is just an NFC card with a nice design. You can of course DIY your own service. Here's a video about how to use the card with other service, like ln.cash for example to create the LNURL and then use a generic free Android NFC writer app(NFC Tools) to setup the card: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxpzW4KTtjY

[dkbit98]

This is offline Lightning contactless card powered by NFC wireless technology, but I think that you can't use this card without passing kyc registration on their website.
I could probably do the exact same thing for free and without any KYC, using any Lightning wallet that is installed on smartphone with NFC support.
For Bolt cards you will need special Lightning enabled POS devices, so I don't think you can use them in most stores, but it is interesting product.
Any Bitcoin stored on card is actually on CoinCorner wallet that is custodial (I think), and to use Bolt as debit card you will need to connect it with your bank account:

CoinCorner is an IOMFSA registered company and we follow rules which require us to ask for standard personal details such as name, email, date of birth and address. These are used for compliance purposes.

Debit card
Use the CoinCorner app to connect The Bolt Card to your CoinCorner wallet and spend with your card like you would a debit card attached to your bank account.

https://www.coincorner.com/TheBoltCard

[Mbitr]

I have some misgivings too. Not really sure about they’re usecase , more of a gimmick I suppose.
My main concern is whether any artists have been contacted/compensated for the use of their art 

[nullama]

This is offline Lightning contactless card powered by NFC wireless technology, but I think that you can't use this card without passing kyc registration on their website.
I could probably do the exact same thing for free and without any KYC, using any Lightning wallet that is installed on smartphone with NFC support.
For Bolt cards you will need special Lightning enabled POS devices, so I don't think you can use them in most stores, but it is interesting product.
Any Bitcoin stored on card is actually on CoinCorner wallet that is custodial (I think), and to use Bolt as debit card you will need to connect it with your bank account:

CoinCorner is an IOMFSA registered company and we follow rules which require us to ask for standard personal details such as name, email, date of birth and address. These are used for compliance purposes.

Debit card
Use the CoinCorner app to connect The Bolt Card to your CoinCorner wallet and spend with your card like you would a debit card attached to your bank account.

https://www.coincorner.com/TheBoltCard

You can definitely use the Bolt Card without a CoinCorner account or any KYC stuff. You can use it with your own lightning node.

I wrote a little guide on how to use these cards without an account in CoinCorner here: https://stacker.news/items/29647

It's basically an NFC card, it's even sold by another (related) company, the same one that sells Mt Socks



And this Bolt Card(or any NFC card really) works with BTCPayServer. Here's a video of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SuhEPSMRoA

I have some misgivings too. Not really sure about they’re usecase , more of a gimmick I suppose.
My main concern is whether any artists have been contacted/compensated for the use of their art  

That's a good point. They do seem to have some original designs, but there are of course some previous ones there like the reddit ad one(Bitcoin Wizard). Not sure if the original artists were contacted.

[NotATether]

I don't get how the card itself can be used for Lightning payments. I don't think that people would pull out a random custodial app just to make LN payments to stuff such as BTCPayServer stores.


Maybe it's just me, but what good are all these crypto-backed cards if they cannot be used to make crypto payments.

Let's face something, a basic truth. The majority of people will always have a card. That's not going to change any  time soon. So the only way all these crypto-backed cards can be useful for anything is if the payment networks can automatically relay those payments towards the corresponding wallet custodian, which then relays the payment to the corresponding blockchain (since we all know that the big payment networks would never agree to such a co-operation). Something like this:

Card -> Payment processor (e.g. Visa) -> Wallet Custodian (receives fiat funds) -> broadcasts corresponding transaction to LN on behalf of user.

This is necessary to achieve ubiquiticy [not sure if that's a word] of payments using crypto under the hood, a necessary step to global adoption of crypto as a payment network.

[nullama]

I don't get how the card itself can be used for Lightning payments. I don't think that people would pull out a random custodial app just to make LN payments to stuff such as BTCPayServer stores.


Maybe it's just me, but what good are all these crypto-backed cards if they cannot be used to make crypto payments.

Let's face something, a basic truth. The majority of people will always have a card. That's not going to change any  time soon. So the only way all these crypto-backed cards can be useful for anything is if the payment networks can automatically relay those payments towards the corresponding wallet custodian, which then relays the payment to the corresponding blockchain (since we all know that the big payment networks would never agree to such a co-operation). Something like this:

Card -> Payment processor (e.g. Visa) -> Wallet Custodian (receives fiat funds) -> broadcasts corresponding transaction to LN on behalf of user.

This is necessary to achieve ubiquiticy [not sure if that's a word] of payments using crypto under the hood, a necessary step to global adoption of crypto as a payment network.

I think you're missing the point.

With this card (or any NFC card really), and lightning through LNURL-Widthrawal you can access your Bitcoin directly from your own lightning node by tapping with it. Here are more details about how to set it up without using their app: https://stacker.news/items/29647

Basically you can replicate the same buying experience you have with a credit card, but without having to go through any legacy financial company. This connects directly to your own sats, there's not even a conversion like some other cards offer. This is straight from your own node to the vendor's node through the card.

[Flexystar]

Definitely interesting card but not the first one to get on to the market. Things are so fast in the crypto space, always upgrading at an alarming rates. Below OP itself I see fellow members talking about another companies who has launched similar cards. It’s unfortunate that there is no direct spending of bitcoin via blockchain, and the reason seems to be the one explained by @NotATether. There is always middle settler because the tech is not advance enough to cash out from banks to Client. Only positive thing is, we get to spend our cryptos.