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Activate with Lightning (L402 Fast Lane)

L402 Fast Lane lets you create a Lightning Enable account and start a full 30-day Agentic Commerce — Individual trial by paying a single 100-sat L402 challenge — no credit card. The signup itself runs on L402: 402 → pay → macaroon proof → account activated. You use the exact payment flow your own APIs and agents will use.

Not the same as "Pay with Bitcoin — 10% off"

That option pays a subscription with Bitcoin for a discount. Fast Lane is a no-card trial activated with a tiny Lightning payment — two different things.

What you'll need
  • A funded Lightning wallet with a little more than 100 sats (to cover the routing fee). L402 requires a wallet that surfaces the payment preimage — LND, Strike, or an NWC wallet (CoinOS, Alby Hub, CLINK). OpenNode and Primal NWC don't surface preimages and won't work here.
  • About a minute.

The fastest path: the MCP tool​

If you run the Lightning Enable MCP with a connected wallet, one tool call does everything:

create_lightning_enable_account(email="you@example.com")

It pays the 100-sat challenge, returns your merchant API key and trial details, and writes the key into ~/.lightning-enable/config.json so the API-key-gated producer tools unlock on the next restart. Requires MCP ≥ 1.15.0 (dotnet tool update -g LightningEnable.Mcp or pip install -U lightning-enable-mcp).

Dev CLI: l402-requests (Python)​

Prefer a script? The l402-requests client auto-detects your wallet and handles the whole 402 → pay → retry handshake, preserving your email through the paid retry:

# pip install "l402-requests>=0.5.0"   # 0.5.0 adds NIP-44 NWC support (Alby Hub, etc.)
from l402_requests import L402Client

client = L402Client()  # auto-detects LND > NWC > Strike > OpenNode from env / config
resp = client.post(
    "https://api.lightningenable.com/api/signup/l402",
    json={"email": "you@example.com"},
    timeout=60,
)
data = resp.json()
print("API key:   ", data["apiKey"])       # save this — it's shown once
print("Trial ends:", data["trialEndsAt"])
print("Dashboard: ", data["dashboardUrl"])

The .NET and TypeScript clients do the same handshake — point them at the same endpoint with a JSON { "email": "…" } body.

Raw protocol (any language)​

The endpoint is a standard two-phase L402 flow, so you can drive it by hand:

  1. Ask for the challenge — POST /api/signup/l402 with body {"email":"you@example.com"}. You get 402 Payment Required with a WWW-Authenticate: L402 macaroon="…", invoice="…" header.
  2. Pay the invoice with any preimage-surfacing wallet to obtain the preimage.
  3. Complete — repeat the POST with the same body plus Authorization: L402 <macaroon>:<preimage>. You get 200 OK and your account:
{
  "apiKey": "lgw_…",
  "merchantId": 123,
  "planTier": "individual",
  "subscriptionStatus": "trialing",
  "trialEndsAt": "2026-08-06T00:00:00Z",
  "dashboardUrl": "https://api.lightningenable.com/dashboard"
}

What you get​

  • A 30-day Agentic Commerce — Individual trial: unlimited L402 endpoints, per-endpoint pricing, and the live dashboard with a per-request payment feed.
  • Your merchant API key — save it, it's shown once. It unlocks the L402 Producer API and the API-key-gated MCP producer/ASA tools.
  • Sign in anytime at the dashboard.

After the trial​

Add billing to keep Individual features, or do nothing and your account automatically moves to the Free Producer Sandbox (3 endpoints, limited monthly challenge volume, 100-sat max challenge price). Either way you keep your account and endpoints — prefer the no-code path? Start the Sandbox directly at api.lightningenable.com/dashboard/signup.

Paying with an email that already belongs to an account won't create a second one — sign in instead.

Lightning Enable is API middleware and never holds your funds. Your wallet pays the challenge directly, and your chosen settlement provider (Strike or OpenNode) custodies every payment on the APIs you monetize.