Accept Lightning Payments From River Users

Yes. River users can send bitcoin over the Lightning Network, and any business that accepts Lightning through the Amboss Payments API can receive those payments directly. River was among the first bitcoin businesses to add Lightning support back in 2019, per the River guide to the Lightning Network, so accepting Lightning turns its US customer base into people who can pay you, with the rail invisible to the payer.

Does River support Lightning?

Yes, for both sending and receiving. River is a bitcoin-only brokerage where users hold a balance, and that balance moves on-chain or over Lightning. To pay you, a customer enters your Lightning invoice in the send flow and confirms. The River Lightning support is a long-standing part of the product.

The River wallet page states the capability plainly:

Send or receive bitcoin on-chain or over the lightning network.

River is US-focused. It describes itself as a bitcoin-only broker for customers in the United States, and personal accounts are available in most US states rather than all of them. Lightning, by contrast, is a global open network, so what you accept does not depend on where the payer lives.

How do you receive payments from River users?

You do not build a River integration. You accept Lightning once and every River user becomes a potential payer. The flow is four steps:

1. Integrate the Amboss Payments API and create a Lightning invoice for the order amount.
2. Show the invoice to the customer as a QR code or a copyable string at checkout.
3. The customer enters or scans it inside River and confirms the send from their balance.
4. The payment routes over Lightning and settles to you in seconds. You fulfill the order.

This is how River payments reach a Lightning-enabled business without the customer ever choosing a "rail" or holding a Bitcoin account with you. Live network capacity and routing data are published on the Amboss Space Lightning explorer.

How do you integrate River receiving into checkout?

Receiving from River is the standard Lightning receive flow: create an invoice, then confirm settlement. A Lightning invoice is a self-contained string defined by the BOLT 11 payment-encoding specification, so the same code path accepts River, Cash App, and any other Lightning sender.

The Amboss Payments API is GraphQL. A single create_receive mutation returns the BOLT 11 invoice you show the customer:

mutation CreateReceive {
  payment {
    transaction {
      create_receive(
        input: {
          wallet_id: "your-wallet-id"
          amount: "50000"
          description: "Order #1234"
        }
      ) {
        status
        payment_request
        payment_hash
      }
    }
  }
}

Send it to the https://rails.amboss.tech/graphql endpoint with your x-api-key. The payment_request field is the lnbc... string you render as a QR code, and you confirm settlement with the payment.completed webhook, as documented in the Amboss Payments API documentation. River also runs its own developer-facing Lightning gateway. Bitcoin Magazine describes River Lightning Services:

RLS is doing for Bitcoin what Stripe did for credit card processing.

Where does Amboss Payments fit?

Lightning is an open standard, which is why a single integration receives from every wallet. River itself, in its CoinDesk coverage, built a gateway so developers could add Lightning payments without running infrastructure, the same problem Amboss Payments solves as a managed API with no node to operate. So the work of accepting a River customer is the same as accepting anyone else on the Lightning Network. If you want to talk through volume, settlement, or pricing, contact the Amboss team.