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Funds travel directly between sender and receiver without passing through BRIX servers.
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BRIX includes an optional 0.5% commission on payments received.
Carol Souza, Brazilian bitcoiner developer and co-founder of Area Bitcoin, presented on March 20 BRIX, an open source software that allows you to receive payments in Bitcoin through the Lightning Network (LN) using a phone number or email address as an identifier.
Souza points out that receiving Bitcoin with BRIX should be as simple as receiving «a transfer through PIX», the most used instant payment system in Brazil, where the identifier is a piece of information that the user already knows by heart.
Today, receiving payments on the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s second-layer network, requires mechanisms such as generate invoices, scan QR codes or share long addresses which for many users can be complex. BRIX aims to eliminate those intermediate steps.
How does BRIX work?
Currently, BRIX is integrated into the Bro App, the application of the Bronostr project, a Nostr client that incorporates Lightning Network functions. BRIX can also be activated from the Bronostr website. However, the BRIX software, being open source, is designed so that any other wallet or platform can integrate it in the future.
To use it, the user registers with their phone number or email and choose an alias that becomes your Lightning addressfor example ‘user@brix.brostr.app’. You then validate your account ownership using a one-time code sent via SMS or email, linking your contact to your ability to receive payments non-custodially, in accordance with the proposal repository.
From that moment on, anyone can send you satoshis (the minimum unit of Bitcoin) from any Lightning-compatible wallet without requiring an address or generating an invoice.
When someone sends satoshis to a BRIX address, the BRIX server resolves the identifier and requests the recipient’s application to generate an invoice. That invoice is returned directly to the issuer’s wallet, which pays it.
Funds travel directly between sender and receiver bypassing BRIX servers: The platform acts as a resolution intermediary, not a custodian of the money.
There is a relevant technical detail that the repository itself points out: the receiver must have the application activein the foreground or background, when someone tries to send you a payment. If offline, the issuer wallet receives an error identified as ‘BRIX_RECIPIENT_OFFLINE’ and the transaction is not completed.
That limitation distinguishes BRIX from a static Lightning address, which can receive payments at any time without the receiver being connected.
Regarding costs, BRIX includes an optional 0.5% commission on payments received. This fraction is automatically managed by the recipient’s wallet, which sends it to the BRIX system after receiving the payment. In this way, the BRIX server never touches the funds, not even to charge the service.
Who is BRIX aimed at?
According to the project documentation, BRIX is designed for both end users and developers. The first ones can register directly on brostr.app or from the Bro App.
Developers can integrate BRIX into their own applications using a programming interface (REST API), a set of rules that allows two software systems to exchange data with each other, or even host their own BRIX server with a custom domain, since the code is available under the MIT license. The tool is available in Spanish, English and Portuguese.
Supported external wallets, such as Phoenix, Coinos, Zeus, BlueWallet, Wallet of Satoshi, Breez, among others, can interact with BRIX using the standard Lightning address, but they can’t use the phone number or email directly as identifier. That functionality is available only among BRIX registered users.
Other initiatives to simplify payments with Bitcoin
BRIX is not the first initiative to use everyday data as a bridge to Bitcoin. Souza’s proposal is part of a broader effort to reduce the technical friction that currently limits Lightning Network adoption.
As reported by NoticiasVE, last September Matt Corallo, Bitcoin Core collaborator, presented BIP-321, a proposal to standardize payment links in Bitcoinaddresses that contain payment instructions and can be opened from browsers or QR codes, so that any wallet interprets them in the same way, without depending on solutions specific to each application.
In April 2025, the company Breez moved in another direction of the same problem: it adapted its development kit so that Lightning payments can be integrated directly into web applications and browsers, without developers or users needing to manage Bitcoin or Lightning nodes. That opens the door to payments in Bitcoin and LN without complex technical infrastructure.
In this way, proposals such as BRIX, BIP-321 and the Breez SDK have the potential to promote the adoption of Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, aiming to mitigate the technical complexity of using these protocols.