NOSTRAS has never bundled a wallet, and never will — not because it's hard, but because a wallet NOSTRAS held for you wouldn't be yours. This page is the real, working alternative: run your own non-custodial Lightning wallet and connect it to NOSTRAS in a few minutes.
Why there's no "Nostras Wallet" button
"Own Your Keys" only means something if it's true for money too. NOSTRAS already speaks a real, open protocol for wallets — NWC (Nostr Wallet Connect, NIP-47) — which means any wallet that speaks it, running anywhere you control, works with NOSTRAS today. Zaps, DVM job payments, paid articles — all of it already goes through whatever wallet you connect. The only piece missing was a clear answer to "okay, which wallet, and how." This page is that answer.
The real, working path
Alby Hub is real, open-source software (Apache-2.0 — you can read every line of it) built on LDK, a genuine Lightning implementation used by other real wallets. When you run it yourself, on hardware or infrastructure you control, the private key never leaves your own machine — that's what makes it actually non-custodial, not just labeled that way.
Desktop app for Mac/Windows/Linux, or Docker on your own server — your choice, covered below.
Alby Hub generates a fresh seed on first run — this is intentionally a new seed, not your Nostr key. Back it up the moment it's shown to you.
Inside Alby Hub, create a new app connection — it gives you a nostr+walletconnect:// URI.
Settings → Wallet in NOSTRAS. Paste the connection string. Done — zaps and DVM payments now go through your own node.
The link in step 1 is NOSTRAS's own referral link — it costs you nothing extra either way, and if you ever do subscribe to anything paid on Alby's side, it sends a small revenue share back to this project. Doesn't change the recommendation above: Alby Hub itself is free and self-hosting is still what we'd point you at.
Where to actually run it
Either option below keeps your key on hardware you control. The real difference is whether your wallet can receive a payment while you're not sitting at it.
Honest tradeoff: your wallet is only reachable while the app is actually running.
Honest tradeoff: real setup effort, and you're now responsible for keeping it up.
Don't want to run the server yourself? LLMOps.Pro — a separate business, not NOSTRAS — offers this as a managed service: they provision and maintain the VPS, you still hold the seed.
Alby also offers a hosted option, Alby Cloud (~$10/month, Alby-run servers) — we're pointing you at the two options below instead, on purpose. Alby's own docs describe Alby Cloud as self-custodial: your Hub's data is encrypted at rest with a password only you know. That's real. But actually running a node means signing real payments, which requires the decrypted key live in memory on whatever machine is doing the signing — for Alby Cloud, that's a server Alby operates, not one you control. Self-hosting either option below is what keeps that key in your hands the whole time it's in use, not just at rest.
Worth knowing before you start: whoever holds your wallet's signing key needs to be online to receive a payment. If you go with the desktop app and it's closed, you won't receive zaps until you open it again. The backup you save in step 2 is the only way to recover funds if that device is lost — NOSTRAS never sees it, so we can't help recover it either.
Where this is headed
Self-hosting is real and works now, but it's real effort. We're researching NOSTRAS Node — infrastructure we'd run for you, using a genuine signer-split architecture (the same pattern real non-custodial Lightning services use) so your key still never touches our servers, even though we're the one keeping the lights on. It's a real, harder engineering problem, not solved yet — this guide is what to use in the meantime, not a placeholder for something better that already exists.