Our thesis at Fulgur is straightforward: bitcoin will eat a serious share of global payments, and the businesses that win will be the ones that make accepting bitcoin as easy as accepting a credit card. That conviction is why we invested in OpenNode. Founded in 2018 by Afnan Rahman and Joao Almeida and based in Los Angeles, OpenNode has spent years quietly turning Lightning into a production-ready payment rail for real merchants.

OpenNode's product line is deliberately practical. Its Bitcoin Payment API supports both on-chain and Lightning, for pay-ins and payouts, with charges that issue a BOLT11 invoice and an on-chain address in the same call. Its Hosted Checkout gives any business a no-code, mobile-friendly bitcoin checkout page in minutes, and its ecommerce plugins drop into common storefronts. Crucially, merchants can choose instant Lightning settlement or automatic conversion into local currency, taking volatility off the table.

What makes OpenNode different from generic crypto processors is its uncompromising focus on Bitcoin and Lightning. There is no token roadmap, no altcoin sprawl, no distraction. The team has chosen the harder path of building deep, reliable infrastructure on the only open monetary network that matters and packaging it so a developer can integrate in an afternoon.

As Lightning capacity, routing reliability, and stablecoin support continue to mature, the addressable market for Bitcoin-native payments expands every quarter. OpenNode is one of the best-positioned teams in the world to capture that demand, and we are proud to back Afnan, Joao, and the company in their mission to bring instant, low-cost bitcoin payments to every business that wants them.