LNURL
Also: Lightning Address
lightning · intermediate
A simple bech32-encoded URL that wallets follow to fetch a Lightning invoice — turning "give me money" into an email-style address.
LNURL is a family of conventions (LNURL-pay, LNURL-withdraw, LNURL-auth) built on top of regular HTTPS. A wallet hits the URL, the server responds with a JSON object describing what to do next — fetch an invoice for X sats, withdraw up to Y sats, sign an authentication challenge.
The most-used variant is the Lightning address: user@domain.com. The wallet expands this to https://domain.com/.well-known/lnurlp/user, fetches a JSON pay-request, and uses it to generate an invoice. The user experience matches email; the underlying protocol is just a thin wrapper around BOLT-11.
LNURL has a known weakness: every interaction goes through the recipient's server, which sees the sender's IP and the payment amount. BOLT-12 offers are the long-term replacement — they keep the email-style UX but resolve over the Lightning gossip network instead of HTTPS.