Satworks

Inspiration

Talented freelancers lose weeks and up to 8% of their earnings just to receive money they'd already earned. With 1.57 billion unbanked adults locked out of platforms like PayPal and Stripe entirely, the global gig economy has an infrastructure problem, and Bitcoin's Lightning Network already has the solution. We built SatWork to make instant, borderless payment the default, not a premium feature.

What it does

SatWork lets employers post gig jobs in plain English and pays workers in Bitcoin the instant their submission is approved. The job budget locks into Lightning escrow upfront so workers know the money exists before they start. An AI agent grades each submission against the signed policy, and approved work triggers an immediate satoshi payment to the worker's personal wallet, no bank account, no waiting, no middleman.

How we built it

Employers write policies in plain English; a Gemini-powered agent parses them into a structured contract signed with a secp256k1 key, so workers can verify terms cryptographically before accepting work. The budget locks into a Lightning hold invoice priced from the median of three live BTC feeds. Each worker gets a fully isolated LNbits user account. Disputes go to a 2-of-3 multisig contract, worker, employer, and SatWork each hold a key, any two can sign to resolve. Stack: Next.js, FastAPI, LNbits, Supabase, Google Gemini.

Challenges we ran into

Our payment tests kept returning "success" while workers received 0 sats, because our admin and worker keys pointed to the same wallet, and LNbits accepted a self-payment with no net movement. We discovered that sub-wallets under a shared LNbits account expose every worker's balance to every other worker, forcing us to create fully isolated user accounts per worker. Wallet keys living only in memory meant every backend restart silently broke payment routing, fixed with Supabase-backed preloading and a frontend cache-warming fallback.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting end-to-end Lightning payments working, from escrow lock to worker wallet credit, in a hackathon timeframe. Cryptographic policy signing means the job terms are tamper-proof and verifiable without trusting us. The 2-of-3 multisign dispute system gives no single party unilateral control over contested funds.

What we learned

Lightning is genuinely ready for micro-payments at scale, sub-second settlement to anyone on earth is real, not marketing. Cryptographic policy signing shifts trust from reputation to math. Wallet isolation is as much a product problem as a technical one: users shouldn't need to understand infrastructure internals to feel their money is safe.

What's next for Satworks

Mobile app for workers in emerging markets, mainnet Lightning integration, reputation scores anchored to on-chain payment history, and expanding task types beyond text to code review, design, and data labeling, all with the same instant-pay guarantee.