In this post, I want to shine a light on the growing ecosystem of apps that let anyone with an internet connection stack sats and participate in the Lightning Network economy.

There are dozens of easy ways to start stacking sats, including simple activities like playing games, engaging on social media platforms, and reading content (which many of us already do without being paid), as well as other ways to earn that more closely represent jobs, such as performing micro-tasks or publishing podcasts.

As with all things in life, you get what you put in, so the more sats you want to earn on Lightning, the more work you should expect to do.

These platforms won’t help you get rich quick, but they will allow you to get onboarded to the Lightning Network in minutes, and start moving sats around the quickly expanding Lightning ecosystem without needing to set up a node, use an exchange, or have any technical knowledge of how Bitcoin works.

Earning Your First Sats

• ZEBEDEE is your portal to Bitcoin gaming, where you can play games to earn sats. They currently have 8 hyper-casual mobile games: Lightning Crush, Bitcoin Miner, Stattrak, Wheel of Crypto, Wheel of Trivia, Amazeballs, Balls King, and SaruTobi.
• THNDR Games builds hyper-casual mobile games for anyone to play and start stacking sats. They currently have 4 games: Bitcoin Bounce, Turbo 84, THNDR Bay, and Satsss.
• Earn Carrot is a mobile app that lets anyone earn sats for reading Bitcoin articles.
• sMiles is a mobile app that lets anyone earn sats for playing chess, walking, or shopping.
• Lightning Network Stores has a faucet that allows anyone to collect a few sats for free.

Earning Thousands of Sats

• Stacker News is a forum where users can earn sats for posting great content. It’s similar to Reddit, except users earn real money rather than upvotes. 310 registered users earned a combined 1.8 million sats last month.
• Sats 4 Likes is a web app that lets anyone earn sats for a number of tasks, including following users on Twitter and sharing their content. 21,000+ users have earned almost 4 BTC to date.
• Microlancer is a marketplace for anyone to perform micro-tasks in exchange for sats. 6,000+ users have earned almost 0.4 BTC to date.
• Satsback is a platform that offers sats-back rewards on the Lightning Network for online shopping at select stores.

Earning Millions of Sats

• Fountain is a podcasting app for anyone to integrate Lightning payments into their show. In my first 6 months of podcasting, I’ve earned over 550,000 sats on Fountain, and a handful of podcasters have earned far more.
• ZEBEDEE also offers two desktop games (CS:GO and ZBD Kart) in addition to their 8 mobile games mentioned above. Notably, in the interview I did with ZEBEDEE CTO André Neves, he said there are ZEBEDEE users earning 200,000 sats per week playing CS:GO on their Infuse platform.
• Fold is a platform that offers sats-back rewards on the Lightning Network for shopping with your Fold card. Fold users earned a combined 90 Bitcoin last year in shopping rewards.
• Stakwork is a platform that lets anyone earn sats for performing micro-tasks. They currently have over 19,000 active workers performing tasks in 46 different countries, some of whom are earning a full time income on the platform.

Final Thoughts

The biggest adoption challenge that Lightning Network apps face today is getting more sats in the hands of more people. Paying users offers a natural solution to this problem, and I expect to see many more Lightning apps use this strategy to onboard new users and disrupt legacy competitors that have to deal with burdensome fixed costs and time delays to make payments.

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