UMA
UMA — a Universal Money Address — is a human-readable address for receiving money, described by its publishers as being like an email address but for money. It uses the Bitcoin Lightning Network underneath. It names a recipient rather than pricing a resource, which is what separates it from the HTTP payment rails.
The problem it states is cross-border payment being expensive, slow and complicated, and its answer is an addressing layer: unique, human-readable addresses that are easy to remember and share, resolved over the Bitcoin Lightning Network for the payment itself.
It sits beside the HTTP rails rather than on them, and the distinction is worth keeping. A payment challenge is a server saying what a resource costs and how to pay for it; an address standard is a way of naming who receives a payment somebody has already decided to make. L402 is the entry that pairs the same underlying network with an HTTP challenge.
→ probe402 records the receiving address each tracked endpoint quoted — open an endpoint from the endpoint list.
Sources
- UMA: Universal Money AddressUniversal Money Address
- The L402 protocol specificationLightning Labs
Related L402 · payTo · payment challenge