The Genesis History of BTCpay Server is arguably one of the most iconic moments in the Bitcoin story. A single developer who feels betrayed by Bitpay, a Bitcoin payment giant and its attempts to co-Optying Bitcoin, declared economic war against the company in a tweet that will never be forgotten by the Bitcoin industry; “This is lies, my confidence in you is broken. I will make you outdated.”
Nicolas Dories continued to create one of the most distributed open source projects in the Bitcoin industry and maybe the billing and paying industry as a whole: BTCPAY SERVER. Much has been written about the context and the motivation behind Dories’s founding of the project – there is even a documentary about it.
What is rarely highlighted is how ambitious a project BTCPAY server is, how functional it has become and how deeply integrated it is with the industry. In fact, it is easy to forget that BTCPAY server as an open source project without centralized database of users and Represents the removal of a basic intermediary treatment payments. As a result, Dories and BTCPAY Server Community have created a public freight infrastructure – a kind of regular payment processing – which gives users real value by saving them fees and giving them a much smoother user experience as no personal information is required for the payments to flow.
Humbly described on their website as “a self-taped, open source cryptocurrency payment processor,” BTCPAY SERVER is a billing and accounting system for merchants, a fully highlighted Bitcoin design book with full knot functions; On-Chain, Lightning Network and Liquid Network Support; Hardware wallet support; and a modular plugin system. Especially plugins expand the core of BTCPAY server to a wide variety of niches. They also integrate into e-commerce giants such as WooCommerce and Shopify.
It is somewhat difficult to measure the success and extent of BTCPAY SERVER. Because it is a self-hosted platform that does not catch customer data of any art-it has no central cloud service, as other payment processors do-our views on its success are somewhat limited.
However, we can get a sense of their reach by proxy to other measurements, for example, their primary software storage has had over 170 open source contributors with 8,393 obligations at the time of writing.
From 2025, BTCpay Server has had a million downloads directly from its GitHub archive, which does not take into account the sky providers of the software, which hosts companies such as excitement or Lunanode. It is also often the case that an instance of BTCPAY server serves more merchants and hosts more stores at the same time.
R0ckstardev, one of the best contributors to the project, Bitcoin Magazine told me that there could be hundreds of thousands of cases of BTCPay server running around the world. Tobe Chileta, a contributor to the project, also told the Bitcoin magazine that “of the seven continents in the world, I think it’s only Antarctica that I haven’t seen anyone run BTCPAY server.” He added, “I’m sure we have merchants running in Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe and Australia.”
Businesses
BTCPAY SERVER’S WEBSITE BUSINESS Folder, while far from exhaustive, covers hundreds of merchants boarding. The BTCpay Server community also conducts regular case studies of user cohorts or larger merchants using the software documenting their integration and history on their case studio page. It provides great insight into a number of Bitcoin communities around the world and includes useful guides on how to repeat different results and implementations.
Namecheap, for example, boasted over $ 70 million Bitcoin volume since their integration of BTCPAY SERVER. From May 18, 2020 to October 2024, the total 1.1 m transactions were clocked in total with over 500,000 users paying in Bitcoin, resulting in over $ 73 million in revenue through payments made from over 200 countries.
BTC Inc, the parent company of the largest Bitcoin conference in the world, has for years created BTCpay server for its merchants and even has an hour’s hour behind the scenes documentary about the complexity of establishing dozens of merchants at a conference (filmed during the Nashville 2024 Bitcoin conference). The event saw over 25,000 participants, including the 47th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
In this latest Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas, BTCPAY server was used to treat a new world record for Bitcoin transactions within an eight-hour period with a total of 4,187 transactions. The original goal was 4,000 transactions and was set by Guinness World Records Organization.
Integrations and plugins
One of the most important dimensions of BTCPAY server is its plugin system. Given the large number of ways companies can interact with Bitcoin, the developer community has optimized the BTCPAY server code against a plugin model that developers can build with a well-documented set of GitHub repos and an API. Today, over 30 plugins are available on BTCPAY SERVER. Here are some of the biggest hits:
Boltz Swap Exchange Plugin
Boltz is an atomic swap exchange that focuses on the various Bitcoin layers such as fluid, lightning, root and of course Bitcoin on-chain. It has gained a prominent nature of late as a very simple solution to the channel that rebalans challenges, lightning wallets face. R0ckstardev told Bitcoin Magazine that he is particularly impressed with the Boltz integration and even tweeted so much earlier this year.
Boltz is labeled as a non-adorable Bitcoin bridge and allows users to switch between different Bitcoin layers while retaining maximum control of their funds using atomic swap technology that eliminates third-party confidence across crypto-native payments. For example, you can use Boltz via BTCPAY server to make a lightning payment where the SATs are originally kept at rest in a floating network wallet and deducted from this balance of Boltz plugin. L-BTC is atomic switched to SAT’s on Lightning Network via Boltz Exchange and Satoshis flows to the final recipient. This whole process is effective not -provides.
This is the same type of “Lightning Service Provider” Style Infrastructure that BREEZ Wallet recently announced integration. While not as cheap as a user-driven lightning nap can be in the best cases, it is far easier to configure and driving-art to require a few clicks on BTCPay Server interface. As far as BTCPAY server is concerned, this Boltz -Plugin represents a full lightning nod that integrates naturally with billing and accounting layers.
This technique also scales quite well: A BTCPAY server administrator can support many different merchants and doesn’t even have to run or manage a standard lightning nap as plugin supports automated liquidity management.
Bolt Cards -plugin
The bolt card, a company and a product created by the random exchange have recently come in the prominence thanks to its unique graphics and laser eyes lit up on tap-to-pay. They also have a BTCpay -server plugin that lets users manage and connect these cool NFC cards to their wallets via plugin.
Bolt cards are NFC Tap-to-Pay devices that act as a debit card. Users can make Bitcoin payments in person with the same tap-to-pay experience provided by Visa and Mastercard, however, with far more privacy, as Bankcards transfer your name and full card information with each payment, while lightning users have the potential to pay directly from their own lightning nodes and without personally identifying information required for payments.
Bolt Card plugin in BTCPAY Server is pretty straightforward, allowing users to configure, reset and check the balance of their bolt card, allowing users to use directly from their BTCPAY server integrated lightning notes.
Ghost Blogging Suite
Ghost, a popular open source blogging tech stack has recently integrated with BTCPAY via a plugin that lets users accept donations and paywall content. The integration covers all types of media formats and supports a tired membership of exclusive content similar to Patreon, but with Bitcoin.
Nostr -Support
Nostr is also integrated as a plugin that unlocks interactivity with the entire ecosystem. Plugin supports user account verification as an alternative to managing a user database and can support zaps and lightning payments via Nostr Wallet Connect.
Satoshi tickets
Satoshi tickets are an event ticket management system, an example of the depth of tools supported by BTCpay Server plugins and the potential it unlocks. The ticket system is of course fully integrated with the billing and payments accounting team, which lets event companies accept Bitcoin and FIAT payments using other plugins and API.
Prism
BTCPAY SERVER has found a reliable niche at Bitcoin conferences, where merchants are often encouraged to accept Bitcoin as payment and are willing to be aboard new technologies. The feedback that is the result of many such tests is that merchants need dollar stability to at least cover their costs, and this is where the prism plugin comes in. Prism provides division of SATs into different pockets of values ​​that allow merchants to transform, 80% of their revenue said to USDT via an exchange as a page break, which keeps the remaining 20% ​​in Bitcoin.
This kind of technology is important for cash flow-heavy companies that have very predictable expenses and cannot do the risk of volatility. However, the surplus can easily remain in BTC if they choose it.
Cash plugin
There is even a cash plugin that supports cash payments using BTCPAY server as a billing suite. It supports a wide range of Fiat currencies, a key function for bricks and mortar companies that do not serve the Bitcoin market primarily.
Podserver
Even podcasters representing a significant and important part of the Bitcoin community can create self-host-podcasting 2.0 streaming via BTCPAY server with a dedicated plugin.
Supporters
BTCPAY server is supported by various philanthropic and pre-profit organizations through grants and donations such as OpenSats, Human Rights Foundation, Spiral and Tether, among others. Individual contributors are sometimes sponsored to perform specifically or general work, while a BTCPAY server nonprofit foundation has also been created to deal with traditional donations and distribute them to contributors on a case-by-case basis.
