What Are Zaps

A Zap is a Lightning payment sent as a reaction to content on a social platform — specifically on Nostr, which will be covered tomorrow.

The concept is simple: instead of clicking a heart or a like button — which costs nothing and means nothing financially — you send the creator a small Lightning payment. A Zap.

Zaps are typically small. 21 sats. 100 sats. 1,000 sats for something genuinely excellent. At current Bitcoin prices, that’s fractions of a cent to a few dollars. But the aggregate adds up for creators with engaged audiences.

What makes Zaps interesting isn’t the amounts — it’s what they change about the relationship between creator and audience.

Likes are free and meaningless. Anyone can like anything with no cost. The metric is gamed, inflated, and tells you little about genuine appreciation. Zaps cost real money, however small. A creator who receives 500 Zaps on a post knows 500 people found it worth a fraction of a cent of real value — not just worth a frictionless tap.

For the creator, Zaps are income. Direct. Instant. No platform taking a 30% cut. No waiting 30 days for a payout. No minimum threshold. A reader in Argentina sends 1,000 sats. It arrives in the creator’s Lightning wallet in under a second.

For the audience, Zapping is a way to support work you value directly — without subscribing, without a payment processor, without sharing financial information with a platform.

Zaps are small in individual amounts and significant in aggregate. They represent a genuinely new model for how creative work gets funded on the internet.

Tomorrow: what is Nostr — the protocol that pairs naturally with Lightning.

— The Daily Bit