Alby, the company behind the popular open-source Bitcoin browser extension for managing public and private keys locally, unveiled a new product that allows users to launch Bitcoin-based apps using a personal Lightning node.

“At Alby, we always focused on building tools and protocols to natively use the Lightning Network on the Web,” company founder ​​Michael Burmann said in a statement. 

While Lightning has become perhaps the most popular Bitcoin scaling solution, offering users cheaper and faster transactions than interacting with the base chain, adoption has been limited by the challenges of running a node at home. Instead of maintaining control over their own coins, today, many Lightning users opt for custodial solutions, which arguably cut against Bitcoin's founding ethos.