Breez rewards the best Lightning Network payment integrations: from BTCPay Server to Primal, here are the winners of the developer challenge.
The Time2Build developer competition has announced the winners of its 2025 edition, an initiative promoted by Breez together with industry partners including Tether, Lightspark, Fulgur Ventures, Plan ₿ Network, PlebLab, Geyser, and Draper University. The event, held between October 7 and November 15, 2025, with a final phase concluding on December 16, put the spotlight on integrating self-custodial payment solutions based on the Lightning Network into existing open-source applications, leveraging the Breez SDK.
The initiative saw participation from more than 50 developer communities from around the world. Submitted projects ranged from plugins to tools and integrations designed for real-world, long-term use. The primary goal was to bring practical Bitcoin functionality to a variety of application domains: from merchant payment systems to social platforms, as well as digital identity protocols and applications built on Nostr.
During the evaluation process, the jury identified several trends in developers’ approaches:
- interoperability as a priority: Lightning technology was frequently used as a connective layer between different protocols, particularly Nostr and Cashu;
- modular approach: developers showed a preference for lightweight plugins rather than deep code integrations. This choice applied to content management systems, forums, game engines, and creator tools, enabling faster implementations, independent iterations, and reduced reliance on upstream maintainer approval.
Winners of the $3,500 in bitcoin
- BTCPay Server (Team Aljaz): the developed plugin enables Lightning transactions on BTCPay Server. Thanks to the Breez SDK implementation, operators no longer need to run a full Lightning node with all the associated channel liquidity complexities, while still retaining control over their funds.
- Evento (Team Brianna, Andre, and Aaliyah): this social platform dedicated to community events integrated the ability to tip participants, support organizers, conduct transactions in satoshis, and interact with services such as Bitrefill directly within the app.
- Portal (Team Alessandro, Gianluca, Gabriele, and John): integrating the Breez SDK into Portal—a protocol and mobile app for identity and payments—makes Lightning a native feature of the protocol itself, allowing any application built on Portal to automatically inherit the ability to send and receive bitcoin.
- Primal (Team Daniel): the Primal web client, one of the most widely used Nostr applications, incorporated Lightning functionality via the Breez SDK. This implementation replaces the previous custodial solution that required KYC procedures and could fail due to geographic or email restrictions. The new process requires no personal information.
$1,000 awards and special mentions
Other projects received $1,000 awards in bitcoin, including:
- an OBS Studio plugin with Lightning donation features, multi-device synchronization, and on-chain support;
- backend support for Cashu Nutshell mints using Spark as the Lightning provider;
- SatsMobi, a Telegram wallet adding self-custodial Lightning capabilities;
- a Spark-based CDK payment processor;
- a Godot Engine plugin for developing games with integrated micropayments;
- a NuGet package for Umbraco with jars for tipping, paywalls, and admin tools;
- a Discourse forum plugin dedicated to tipping;
- a reward system for CTFd in capture-the-flag cybersecurity competitions.
Special prizes from Draper University and PlebLab recognized contributions in educational gamification and Nostr-focused wallets:
- Lib de Satoshi & B4OS: a community platform that integrated Lightning to “gamify” education (DraperU award);
- Sparkihonne: a Nostr-oriented wallet experience combining identity, messaging, and payments (PlebLab award).
The competition highlighted growing developer interest in embedding Bitcoin payments into digital spaces where users are already active, favoring plugin-based approaches and using Lightning as a connective layer between different technologies. Organizers emphasized that future developments will depend on continued builder participation across areas such as messaging apps, wallets, and new, innovative applications.
The Breez team stated:
“The era of building has begun. Whether that means adding Bitcoin to messaging apps like Signal, integrating it into leading crypto wallets, or bringing Lightning into entirely new apps with use cases we’ve yet to dream up, we can’t wait to see what you do next. It’s time to build.”
