Fulgur Ventures invests in Alby, the open-source toolkit putting Bitcoin Lightning and Nostr directly into the browser. Founded in 2022 by Michael Bumann and Moritz Kaminski, Alby ships a browser-extension wallet, the self-custody Alby Hub node solution, and a suite of developer APIs that let any website accept sats, sign Nostr events, and build with native Bitcoin money primitives. The team operates fully remote and ships at a relentless pace.

In 2024, Alby made a defining decision: sunsetting its custodial Lightning wallet and pivoting users toward Alby Hub, a self-custody node anyone can run. That move sacrificed easy growth for principled architecture, exactly the kind of trade-off we admire. It signals a team that understands Bitcoin custody is not a feature but a foundation, and that long-term users deserve sovereignty over their keys and channels.

Alby fits squarely in our thesis on consumer wallets and developer infrastructure. The browser is still where the open web lives, and Alby is the missing payment and identity layer between Lightning rails and ordinary URLs. By unifying NWC, LNURL, BOLT12, and Nostr key management in one extension, Alby compresses years of fragmented protocol work into a single onboarding flow that developers and users can actually understand.

Our market vision is straightforward: every web app will eventually speak sats, and value-for-value will become a default monetization primitive rather than a niche experiment. Whoever owns the connector between browsers, AI agents, and Lightning nodes will sit at a strategic chokepoint. Alby is already the most installed Bitcoin extension on Chrome and Firefox, with thousands of integrated apps and a vibrant builder community.

Put simply, Alby turns the web into a Bitcoin-native economy. We are proud to support Michael, Moritz, and the team as they extend Lightning and Nostr to every browser tab on Earth.