Publishing Platform Substack to Accept Onchain, Lightning Network Bitcoin Payments via Opennode

On Monday, the publishing platform Substack revealed the company is now accepting bitcoin payments. Substack will be working with the payment processor Opennode and the publishing platform will leverage the Lightning Network and onchain payments.

Substack Partners With Payment Processor Opennode to Support Bitcoin Payments

The online platform Substack is a publishing, analytics, and design infrastructure web portal that was founded in 2017. The website provides support for subscription newsletter services and to-date, Substack has over 500,000 paid subscribers.

The California-based company has grown popular since its inception and has a global website ranking of 3,643, according to statistics from similarweb.com. In the U.S. Substack has a ranking of around 1,538 and the U.S. represents 46.11% of the site’s traffic. Substack has dropped down the ladder in terms of website rankings for the United States, according to similarweb.com’s data.

On August 23, the bitcoin payment processor Opennode published a press release explaining that Substack would be accepting BTC.

“[Substack] has integrated their bitcoin API to offer bitcoin payments on the online publishing platform,” the company said. “Opennode will power both [onchain] and Lightning Network bitcoin payments,” Opennode further added. The announcement also says, at the start, paying with BTC will be able to be used with “select publications.”

“We’re excited to be working with Opennode to enable independent publishers on Substack to accept crypto payments,” Nick Inzucchi, the product designer at Substack explained. “Having this option will give writers more flexibility and freedom, and we look forward to doing more in crypto to meet writers’ needs.”

Opennode CTO: ‘Bitcoin Is a Natural Fit for Substack’

Dan Held from Kraken explained that he was pleased to help Substack along with the company’s latest decision. “Excited to have played a part in helping [get] bitcoin payments enabled at Substack, I really appreciated the responsiveness of leadership listening to our requests,” Held said.

Peter Yang from creatoreconomy.so said on Twitter: “This is a big deal. Congrats Substack, Opennode, and all parties involved.”

“Our partnership will allow content creators across the Substack ecosystem to accept bitcoin payments, and retain earnings in bitcoin or convert to preferred currency. Writers and podcasters have flocked to Substack to regain creative and financial freedom, and bitcoin is a natural fit,” João Almeida, the co-founder and CTO at Opennode concluded during the announcement.