There is no doubt that the Genesis story of BTCPay server is one of the most iconic moments in Bitcoin’s history. A single developer who felt betrayed by the Bitcoin payment giant and its attempts to choose Bitcoin, announced an economic war on the company in a tweet that the Bitcoin industry will never forget. “This is a lie, my trust in you is broken, I will make you obsolete.”
Nicolas Dorier continues to create one of the most widely distributed open source projects in the Bitcoin industry, perhaps the entire invoice and payments industry: BTCPAY servers. There has been a lot of articles about Dorier’s background and motivation to build the project – and there is even a documentary.
It is rarely emphasized that the ambitiousness of the BTCPay server project, its affluent functionality and its level of integration with the industry. In fact, it is easy to forget that as an open source project without a user’s centralized database, BTCPAY servers are all large-scale privacy upgrades to users. and Representative cancellation of the basic intermediary to process the payment. As a result, Dorier and the BTCPAY server community created a public commodity infrastructure (a sharing of payment processing) that provides users with real value by saving them on their expenses and provides them with a smoother user experience, given that there is no personal information to pay for the process.
The BTCPAY server humbly describes itself as “a self-hosted open source cryptocurrency payment processor” on its website, which is a merchant’s invoice and accounting system, a complete featured Bitcoin wallet with full node functionality; on-chain, Lightning Network and Liquid Network support; hardware wallet support; and modular plug-in system. This plugin specifically extends the core of the BTCPAY server to various wall niches. They also incorporate e-commerce giants like WooCommerce and Shopify.
It is somewhat difficult to measure the success and scope of a BTCPAY server. Because it is a self-hosted platform that does not capture any type of customer data (it does not have a central cloud service for other payment processors), we have limited perspectives on success.
However, we can understand their impact by proxying other metrics, for example, their main software repository has over 170 open source contributors and 8,393 submissions were submitted at the time of writing.
As of 2025, BTCPAY servers have downloaded 1 million downloads directly from their GitHub repository, which cannot describe the cloud provider of software hosted by companies such as Voltage or Lunanode. Typically, an instance of a BTCPAY server serves multiple merchants and hosts multiple stores at the same time.
R0CKSTARDEV, one of the biggest contributors to the project, told Bitcoin Magazine that there may be hundreds of thousands of BTCPAY server instances running around the world. Tobe Chileta, a contributor to the project, also told Bitcoin Magazine, “Of the seven continents of the world, I think only Antarctica I haven’t seen anyone running a BTCPAY server yet.” He added: “I’m sure we have businessmen operating in Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe and Australia.”
company
The BTCPAY server’s website business directory, while far from exhaustive, covers hundreds of merchants. The BTCPAY server community also conducts case studies on user accomplices or major businessmen who use the software and document their integrations and stories on their case study pages. It provides wonderful insights to various Bitcoin communities around the world and provides useful guides on how to replicate a variety of results and implementations.
For example, Namecheap has over $70 million in Bitcoin volume since Namecheap integrated the BTCPAY server. From May 18, 2020 to October 2024, they made 1.1 million transactions, with more than 500,000 users paying Bitcoin, thus earning over $73 million in revenue through payments in more than 200 countries.
BTC Inc, the parent company of the world’s largest Bitcoin conference, has built BTCPAY servers for its merchants for years and even owned an hour-long behind-the-scenes documentary about the complexity of building dozens of merchants at a conference (filmed during the 2024 Bitcoin Conference in Nashville). The event has more than 25,000 attendees, including Donald J. Trump, the 47th President of the United States.
In the recent Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas, the BTCPAY server was used to process a new world record of Bitcoin transactions in eight hours, with a total of 4,187 transactions. The initial goal was 4,000 deals, set by the Guinness World Records organization.
Integrations and plug-ins
One of the most important dimensions of a BTCPAY server is its plug-in system. Given the many ways companies can interact with Bitcoin, the developer community has optimized the BTCPAY server code into a plug-in model that developers can build for with well-documented GitHub Repos and APIs. Today, there are more than 30 plug-ins on the BTCPAY server. Here are some of the greatest hits:
Boltz Switch Switch Plugin
Boltz is an atomic exchange that focuses on various Bitcoin layers such as liquids, lightning, rootstocks, and of course, Bitcoin chains. Recently, it has become a very simple solution to the channel rebalancing challenge faced by Lightning Wallet. R0CKSTARDEV told Bitcoin Magazine that he was particularly impressed by Boltz Integration, even tweeted earlier this year.
Boltz is marked as a non-monitoring Bitcoin bridge, allowing users to use atomic exchange technology to exchange different Bitcoin layers between retaining maximum control over funds, thus eliminating third-party trust in local payments across crypto. For example, you can use Boltz to make a lightning payment via a BTCPAY server, where SATS is initially stationary in a liquid network wallet and pulled out of that balance by the Boltz plugin. L-BTC is atomically exchanged on the lightning network of the final receiver through Boltz Exchange and Satoshis. The whole process is actually non-monitoring.
This is the type of “lightning service provider” style infrastructure that Breez Wallet recently announced integration. While it’s not as cheap as a user-operated Lightning node, it’s much easier to set up and run in the best case – just a few clicks on the BTCPAY server interface. As far as BTCPAY server is concerned, this Boltz plugin represents a complete lightning node, locally integrated with the invoice and accounting layers.
The technology can also be very good at scaling: a BTCPAY server administrator can support many different merchants without even having to run or manage standard lightning nodes, as the plugin supports automatic liquidity management.
Bolt card plug-in
The company and product Bolt Card, created by Concenter Exchange, has recently attracted attention due to its unique graphics and paid-click laser eye. They also have a BTCPAY server plugin that allows users to manage these cool NFC cards and connect them to their wallets through the plugin.
螺栓卡是NFC Tap-to-to-to-to-to-to-to-to-to-to-to-to-to付款设备。 Users can make Bitcoin payments in person, which is the same payment experience delivered by Visa and MasterCard, although with more privacy, as the bank card passes your name and full card details to each payment you have, and Lightning users have the potential to make payments directly from their own Lightning nodes without personally identifying the payment information to be processed.
The bolt card plugin in the BTCPAY server is very simple, allowing users to set, reset and check the balance of their bolt card, allowing users to spend directly from the lightning nodes integrated by their BTCPAy server.
Ghost Blog Suite
Ghost is a popular open source blog Tech stack that has recently integrated with BTCPay through plugins to allow users to accept donated and paywall content. The integration covers all forms of media formats and supports exclusive content memberships for tired, similar to Patreon but with Bitcoin.
NOSTR support
NOSTR also integrates it as a plugin that unlocks interactivity with the entire ecosystem. The plugin supports user account verification as an alternative to managing user databases and can support ZAPS and LIGHTNING payments via NOSTR Wallet Connect.
Satoshi Tickets
Satoshi Tickets is an event ticketing management system that is an example of the depth of tools supported by the BTCPAY server plugin and its unlocking potential. The ticket system is of course fully integrated with the invoice and payment accounting layer, allowing the activity business to accept bitcoin and fiat payments with the help of other plugins and APIs.
Prism
BTCPAY servers find reliable niches at Bitcoin conferences, often encouraging merchants to accept Bitcoin as payments and willing to enter new technologies. The feedback generated by many such tests is that merchants need dollar stability to at least pay for the cost, which is where the Prism plugin comes from. The prism allows SATS to flow separately to different values, allowing businessmen to automatically convert, for example, by exchanging sideShift, to exchange 80% of their income for USDT, such as sideShift, keeping the remaining 20% score 20%.
This technology is crucial for heavy cash flow companies with very predictable expenses and unbearable volatility risks. However, if they choose, the profits are easily left in BTC.
Cash plugin
There is even a cash plugin that can support cash payments using the BTCPAY server as an invoicing suite. It supports multiple fiat currencies, a key feature for physical businesses that do not serve the Bitcoin market.
pod
Even podcasts representing important and important parts of the Bitcoin community can be set up with a dedicated plugin through the BTCPAY server.
supporter
BTCPAY servers are made by various charitable and for-profit organizations through grants and donations such as Opensats, Human Rights Foundation, Spirals and Bondages, etc. Individual contributors sometimes initiate specific or general work, and the BTCPAY Server Nonprofit Foundation also sets up a base for processing traditional donations and allocating them to contributors.
