Wavespace Launches MiCA-Compliant Self-Powered Bitcoin Debit Card by Lightning and NWC
Wavespace, a Bitcoin neobank serving the Eurozone, has announced MiCA compliance for its ‘self-sustaining’ debit card. A small fintech company is at the cutting edge of Bitcoin payments technology in Europe, with the support of the Lightning Network, and auto DCA to handle it.
Debit cards in the Bitcoin and crypto-wide industry traditionally work by pre-loading storage accounts with bitcoin or stablecoins. The pre-loading process used to be on-chain, time-consuming to configure and required manual input from the user to send from self-hosted wallets or cold storage. If the pre-loaded balance runs out on the card, spending would not be possible.
Wavespace’s self-storage debit card solves these problems with a novel Bitcoin technology called Nostr Wallet Connect, or NWC for short. This legal process, written in NIP-47, allows users to connect a service like this debit card to a self-service lightning terminal. The user sets a minimum balance, say $200 and every time the user spends on the card using the VISA network, Wavespace pulls credits from the user’s wallet to top up the card. This process reduces the risk of a secure exchange while increasing the user’s exposure to the asset and removing the friction of using bitcoin.
NWC is a technology developed by the Nostr ecosystem, a high-tech niche in the Bitcoin industry that includes social media and other communication systems.
Wavespace Neobank
As a high-tech neobank, Wavespace offers users a personal IBAN account, to which they can send fiat, to buy Bitcoin. Their automatic DCA services can be set to withdraw bitcoin when purchased from a designated Bitcoin address.
The company is MiCA compliant, making it one of the few remaining Bitcoin exchanges in Europe, as complex crypto regulations come online.
On the privacy front, Wavespace Lightning’s deep network integration allows the user to access the banking system in a clear and consistent way, without exposing all their payment data to the Bitcoin blockchain. Since lightning payments are not active, there is not a single public record that leaks user data; instead, transactions flow through payment channels between various user services, leaving no visible public trail. The result is a growing compromise between the high privacy, cypherpunk values that have created the Bitcoin and crypto industry, while also opening up access to a dying financial system, and compliant integration with heavily regulated areas like Europe.
In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Eivydas Račkauskas, Chief Orange Pill Giver at Wavespace, said that 70% of payments made on the platform use the Lightning Network and that the company is looking at the ARK protocol to integrate storage-oriented payments. He also revealed that the company has been merged with Lightspark and is ready to expand in the USA, although he did not reveal any other details on the matter.
Wavespace is almost completely consolidated and self-funded, according to Račkauskas, except for the first Relai angel investor who backed them in 2025. They are currently in the middle of another fundraising round.
