BOLT 12 Offers Available for All Lexe Beta Users

By Max Fang – Feb 4th, 2026

Lexe is excited to announce that BOLT 12 offers are now available to all Lexe Beta users! Lexe is a self-custodial Lightning wallet with free 24/7 node hosting. BOLT 12 offers are reusable, static payment identifiers that allow anyone with a BOLT 12-compatible wallet to receive Lightning payments without having to generate a new invoice for every payment. Export an offer from your Lexe wallet and slap it on your website, and you'll never miss another payment.

What is BOLT 12? What is an "offer"?

BOLT 12 is a Lightning Network specification which defines a new Bitcoin payment resource called an "offer". Since it is a BOLT, all Lightning implementations are required to support it.

A offer begins with lno1... and looks like this:

lno1pgf4qcteyp6x7grdv9uyqmr90pjjuctswqgwsqc55a6j85wuh3wm2cypah9uyj4cyze4udp6d3nkj9mduuruz7x52upljvs9264v7d346ngxgqylzzh8tyr8l05942qafa82zqj2rhy99ngzqwgu63a9c83r8h9du57zsdr2ys554qs6p85g0r26e4xv3wqtvxmfjqpn9eu6n8sn60n4ntgvazc8gy4679nhrdufz2emuk0tx93j6pk8d59stagjjmhz6zdler6y3he46366530vkgpr9u0stg96kmamw39e0gdt9llmgsdggfygks3cqlqsn2u8pv290ccq9sg7tm37vgl0q4qge8j4slxth33fhuh037gckljtcjry54z35zq7nrpmq6t90y0f4lyv7mvpzgyxcetcv5hxzurszcss9r274a0c3dqzdpps7u7qrqmzxuj38wz3g5m744v5axps0esrjlpv

This offer can be encoded into a QR code which looks like this:

Using any BOLT 12-compatible wallet, you can scan the QR code above and send a payment, without requiring any interaction with the receiver (which in this case is Max, Lexe co-founder!).

Why offers? What's the big deal?

Since day one, offers have been a core part of Lexe's vision. While BOLT 11 invoices are perfectly fine for most in-person payments, they bring frictions which impede the broader adoption of Bitcoin payments, particularly for e-commerce and other online transactions.

Here are a couple examples of payment flows you can build with BOLT 12 which are not possible with BOLT 11 only:

• Round-the-clock donations: As an open-source developer or independent writer, you can accept donations over the Lightning Network to support your work. Simply put the offer QR code on your personal website or social media, and people can send you donations without having to pay on-chain fees. If the sender's wallet supports it, they can also configure their wallet to automatically send donations on a fixed schedule. Donors may identify themselves in a "payer note" they attach to each payment, or they can remain anonymous.
• Recurring push payments: For subscriptions and pay-as-you-go services like VPNs, cell phone plans, cloud compute, and LLM inference, the service provider can generate an offer for each of their users. Whenever a payment is received to a user's offer, the service provider credits the user's account proportionally with the amount of Bitcoin received. Each user can save their "service top-up offer" in their wallet and pay it whenever they need to top up their account. We envision a future where users can initialize a subscription with a one-time setup, then let their wallet automatically top up their service credits on a fixed schedule or whenever it detects that their balance is low, ideally through an open and interoperable standard for communicating credit balances.

BOLT 12 is the first step towards building Bitcoin payment flows which can match the low friction and "set-and-forget" experience of traditional credit card subscriptions, but with much better privacy, and significantly less sensitive data available if a subscription service suffers a data breach!

There's no "offline receive" problem at Lexe

Lexe doesn't suffer from the "offline receive" problem which plagues other self-custody wallets, because of Lexe's unique architecture. This is especially important for offers, because unlike BOLT 11 where the receiver must create an invoice to receive a payment, BOLT 12 receivers are usually offline at the time of payment.

A simple test: does your wallet support offline receive?

You can do a simple test which takes ~2 minutes to determine whether your wallet can receive payments while you're offline. All you need is two Lightning wallets on two different phones - perhaps on your phone and a friend's.

1. Create an invoice or offer on the first phone, then put the first phone in airplane mode.
2. Scan the invoice or offer from the second phone, and try to pay with a small test amount.

If it succeeds, congrats! Your wallet supports offline receive. If the payment hangs or fails, that's exactly the frustrating experience someone else will have if they try to pay you and your phone happens to be offline or unresponsive for any reason.

As of January 2026, Lexe is the only self-custodial Lightning wallet with real offline-receive capability and practical unilateral exit.

Find your BOLT 12 offer inside Lexe Wallet

On the main wallet page, press "Receive":

Then, in the toggle under the QR code, select "Reusable".

Done! You may optionally add a description or minimum amount.

Getting access to Lexe Wallet

Lexe is currently in closed beta, and is in final preparations for a public launch. To get a signup code when a spot becomes available, please go to https://lexe.app.