Hey folks, it's your least favorite person here - one of the Lightspark folks who designed UMA. I wanted to let the dust settle a bit, but I'm hoping I can clarify some things about UMA and how we see it extending LNURL for a different use case than LNURL is likely to support.

First of all - it was a key design goal to extend LNURL while pushing as much as we can back into LUDs or make use of existing ones (we use and build on LUDs 6, 16, 18, and the 21 currency proposal). In fact, check out the first paragraph of our spec README: https://github.com/uma-universal-money-address/protocol. We will not accept any spec proposals that should be LUDs moving forward and plan to push as much from UMA back into LNURL as the community is willing to accept. If folks felt co-opted or slighted in credit for the great work on LNURL, that was absolutely not our intention. We tried to reference LNURL as much as possible in our docs and give credit where credit is due. If you think there are places we could do better in that regard, please let us know.

That being said, we know that LNURL is very unlikely to accept parts of UMA - namely the compliance features. We know the community has good reasons for being averse to those tools, but unfortunately they're a necessary part of being able to bring our customers (regulated financial institutions) onto the Lightning Network. The way we see it is that UMA is enabling millions more people to participate in the network through financial institutions they already use.

To be clear - with some minor caveats, UMA is a superset of LNURL-pay, which means the UMA SDKs have now also provided an LNURL SDK in 6 languages to a bunch of massive institutions. We know many of them will now support lnurl-pay directly as a result, which is a *great* thing for LNURL. For those vasps that choose to reject plain lnurl transactions, they'll still have a working lnurl-pay implementation now and we believe the pressure from us, other vasps, and the other participants in the network will encourage them to just open it up over time. Having an implementation is a necessary first step regardless.

We intend to be active participants in this community, take feedback and iterate with you to better align UMA with LNURL where it makes sense and write and contribute to LUDs along the way. I know a lot of folks here may not be happy with us right now, and may never be. We'll do all we can to be good citizens and keep the lines of communication open for feedback.
https://t.me/lnurl/36264