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Introduction

Static Charges are a type of Payment Request QR code in the Bitcoin Lightning Network that has some incredible characteristics and capabiltiies. Whereas Charges create fixed-amount and single-use Payment Requests that expire, Static Charges provide you a lot more flexibility & capabilities, including:

Variable Amounts

Static Charges have both minAmount and maxAmount properties, allowing for the payer to define the amount.

Multi-use QRs

By default Static Charges have no expiration time, making them usable for any N payers and payments.

Slots

Slots allow you to define that only N payments are to be accepted for this specific Static Charge QR.

Success Message

When a payment is completed, a Success Message can be displayed to the payer (e.g. receipt, link).

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What is a Static Charge?

A Static Charge is a static QR code that can be used an unlimited number of times, does not expire, accepts various amounts, accepts attached messages, and allows for full configurability, all while maintaining the same QR code. A Static Charge QR code looks like the one show below:
ZBD Static Charge

ZBD Static Charge


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Common use cases

There are many potential scenarios where Static Charges are very handy. Let’s take a look at couple of them.

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User deposits

Static Charges are excellent for handling user deposits. You can generate a Static Charge for each unique users in your platform and provide that QR code to them. Whenever payments come in through that specific Static QR code, you will know it belongs to such user. Your users can now receive money from any Bitcoin Lightning wallet. Static Charges can be set up such that they can be used an unlimited number of times and they do not expire. It makes receiving payments extremely easy. *Just like every user has a $venmotag for Venmo, every ZBD user has an Static Charge. The only difference between the two is that there is interoperability between different providers since they understand the same money protocol.

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In-person fundraising

One crafty thing you can do for donations is throw a Static Charge QR code on a large screen and anyone who has a wallet can now pay you directly just by scanning and confirming a payment. The ZBD API makes this incredibly easy. Since there are no limits to the number of Static Charges created, you could create one for each campaign and properly measure donation goal reach. Cool, right? This is great for nonprofits!

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Remote fundraising / donations

Streamers can take their QR image and easily add it to any streaming software (e.g. OBS) to enable direct payments to them from their audience. Never has this been possible before. Please check out ZBD Streamer to view this live in a ZBD product.

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User tips / Zaps / User-to-user payments

Static Charges are great for tips or commonly referred to as “zaps”. It can also be used for user-to-user payments, since they are a static QR code. Though the best user experience for these use cases is a Lightning Address.

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Deposits

Users can attach Static QR codes to their blog posts, social media posts, images, live streams, videos, & art.