Privacy Policy — Crypto / Lightning

This addendum covers privacy considerations specific to paying for a Joyp subscription with Bitcoin (on-chain) or Bitcoin via the Lightning Network. It supplements the global Privacy Policy — read that first.

No KYC for crypto payments

We do not collect Know-Your-Customer (KYC) information when you pay with Bitcoin or Lightning. Your account email is the only personal identifier required to subscribe. We rely on BTCPay Server as our self-hosted payment processor, which generates a fresh on-chain address (or Lightning invoice) for each payment and never asks you for identity documents.

If you provide additional personal information voluntarily (for example, attaching a name to a refund request), you do so outside of the crypto payment flow and the standard privacy policy applies.

On-chain payments are public by design

Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a public blockchain. The transaction ID, amounts, and addresses are visible to anyone with a block explorer. We do not link the on-chain address to your account email in any public-facing system; that linkage is internal to our subscription database. However, if you reuse the same on-chain address across services, third parties may be able to correlate your activity. Best practice: do not reuse addresses, and consider funding your payment from a freshly-derived wallet.

Refunds are irreversible. Once a Bitcoin transaction is confirmed on-chain, it cannot be reversed. If you need a refund (for example, because the service was inaccessible or you double-paid), see our Refund Policy — we issue refunds as new on-chain transactions to an address you provide.

Lightning Network custody model

We operate a Lightning node ourselves (Core Lightning, with inbound liquidity provided by Megalith via LSPS1). When you pay an invoice generated by us, the sats are routed through the public Lightning Network and arrive at our channels. We hold the resulting balance custodially in our node — it is not held in your name, and we do not provide wallet services to you.

Lightning payments themselves are private at the protocol layer (no public ledger). Your wallet, our node, and any intermediary routing nodes know about the routed payment, but it is not broadcast to the world the way an on-chain transaction is. We do not log Lightning payment metadata beyond the payment hash and amount required for accounting and refund processing.

What we record about a crypto payment

• Payment method (BTC on-chain or Lightning).
• Invoice ID (BTCPay-generated reference).
• Amount paid (in BTC / sats and the USD equivalent at the time of payment, for tax records).
• Payment timestamp.
• Subscription tier purchased.

We do not record IP addresses against payments beyond standard server access logs (30-day retention; see global policy retention table). We do not share any of this information with on-chain analytics firms.

Tax recordkeeping

Payment records (amounts and timestamps, not on-chain addresses) are retained for 7 years to satisfy US tax law. This retention is a legal obligation and cannot be waived even on account deletion.