Blogs & Articles: Building on Lightning: Flash Is Reinventing Caribbean Money with the Breez SDK 🔗 16 weeks ago

Many of the SDK partners we’ve profiled so far have been improving an existing service that Lightning can serve better than fiat: e-vehicle charging stations, local community building, and financing private healthcare. They’re stories of optimization. But what if the monetary system across an entire region — the Caribbean — was basically stuck in the 13th century?

Dread is a former world-class pole vaulter, co-founder of Plebnet, tech veteran, and charismatic IT consultant. He’s also from Jamaica, one of the most beautiful islands in one of the most beautiful archipelagoes in one of the most beautiful seas with some of the most beautiful people in the world, but hearing him talk about how money and financial institutions work in the Caribbean is reminiscent of how monetary systems worked back in medieval Europe. Banks pretty much exist, but they simply rob their depositors. Credit cards pretty much exist, but they often charge >40% interest. Inflation is around 10.35%, which is historically low. It’s not even bad until it’s over 25%. The system is so distrusted globally that many people in the region are denied access to e-commerce, and you can forget fiat fintech conveniences like Venmo and PayPal.

It’s always struck me as a suspicious coincidence that the legend of Robin Hood first emerged in the 13th century — around the same time as modern banking. Nowadays, the Sheriff of Nottingham would be a suit in a high-rise on the Kingston waterfront.

In fact, Dread is so disillusioned with the state of Caribbean monetary systems that he’s not even trying to bring them up to global benchmarks. As a bitcoiner, he knows that the near future is better than the present, so why not just leapfrog to it directly? That’s Flash: the app that’s going to catapult the Caribbean from pre-modern financial exploitation to a hypermodern, circular Lightning economy. And Dread is building Flash with the Breez SDK.

Flash Goes from Exploitation to Lightning in Two Steps

Dread makes an excellent point that many Caribbean markets already have circular economies; it’s just that they use cash exclusively. People don’t trust their own currencies, but they trust the banks even less, so they avoid them whenever possible. And the best currency most people are familiar with is the US dollar.

You’d think that bitcoin would be an easy sell because it solves a lot of the problems blighting the region. But remember that fintech and payment apps are basically nonexistent. Bitcoin is a really hard sell to people who only trust the bills in their pockets, preferably bearing pictures of dead American presidents.

Since people in the Caribbean want $USD, Flash lets them have it with a custodial Lightning wallet. They see USD denominations displayed, but the money on their backend ledgers is all in bitcoin, and the rails are Lightning. As a result, any Flash user can transact with users of Flash and a number of other custodial Lightning apps (e.g. Strike, CashApp) for zero fees. This is especially important for remittances, which account for >20% of GDP in several Caribbean countries.

However, Dread has said that his goal is to make Flash obsolete by converting the Caribbean to bitcoin, and the first step is to make custodial wallets obsolete in each user’s mind. The idea is that users will notice how the bitcoin underlying the USD on the display is constantly appreciating, which is a trick no fiat dollar — Jamaican or American — can do.

That’s where Flash’s non-custodial wallet — and the Breez SDK — come into play. Once users get hooked on bitcoin and become accustomed to working with fintech apps on their phones, they can shift from custodial to non-custodial Lightning as gradually or suddenly as they like. USD as the gateway drug for bitcoin. Using fiat to make itself obsolete. That’s my kinda hack!

Flash also includes a Nostr interface, which allows users to obtain support easily, to contact businesses on the network, and to spread the word about issues like the advantages of sats vs. dollars and self-custody vs. delegated custody.

Building on Open-Source Foundations

For the custodial side of Flash, Dread is working with IBEX and Galoy because they’re pros and their code is open source. It’s a smart move given the regulatory complexity of managing other people’s money, especially in multiple jurisdictions and currencies.

For the non-custodial side, he’s turned to the Breez SDK. Dread admitted to being a little skeptical when I first told him about our SDK, but the simplicity and abstraction along with the stable releases coming out on pretty much a weekly basis convinced him. He admits that he’s more of a process engineer than a software engineer, but he told me that Breez “made it easy enough for someone who is not a super-coder to put it into an app.” At first, Dread feared he didn’t have the coding chops to implement any kind of non-custodial service in Flash, but with the Breez SDK he implemented the six functions Flash needs in about a week.

I love to hear that because Flash and Breez share a lot of DNA. Dread says another reason he opted for our SDK is because it’s all FOSS. As to why that mattered, Dread quoted his own personal and corporate mission statement: free the code; free the money; free the market.

Sounds sweet and dandy.

Building on Lightning: Flash Is Reinventing Caribbean Money with the Breez SDK was originally published in Breez Technology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.