All-in-One Cashu Mint Manager
Explore guides and references for setting up, running, and tending your own Cashu mint with Orchard, your sovereign bank in cyberspace.
Who it’s for
Section titled “Who it’s for”Orchard is for anyone who runs, or wants to run, their own mint on hardware they control.
- Individuals: you’d rather operate the mint than rely on a custodian.
- Communities & projects: you want to issue ecash for your community.
- Companies: you want to offer ecash as part of your product.
You don’t have to be a Lightning wizard to start, just willing to tend your own setup. Orchard helps you manage the day-to-day with a single web application spanning Bitcoin, Lightning, and Cashu.
What Orchard does
Section titled “What Orchard does”A sovereign Cashu mint is more than the mint itself: it’s a Bitcoin node, a Lightning node, and the mint that settles between them. The hard part is keeping all three online and healthy at once. Orchard wraps the whole stack in one manager:
- Bitcoin: node health and mempool activity at a glance.
- Lightning: live updates on payments and activity (channel management coming soon).
- Mint: info, keysets, activity events, and trends in one place.
- Server: health and metrics for the machine (or machines) it all runs on.
- AI Agent: an agent harness that watches your services so you don’t have to live in the logs.
What you’ll need
Section titled “What you’ll need”-
A Cashu mint to manage. Orchard manages a mint. It doesn’t replace one. You’ll point it at your mint’s backend.
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A payment backend. Your mint settles through a payment processor — usually Lightning, but Spark, Ark, Stripe, and others work too. Orchard connects to whichever your mint uses.
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Somewhere to run it. Orchard is self-hosted: a VPS, a home server, or any box you control and can keep online.
Choose your path
Section titled “Choose your path”How you set Orchard up depends on where you’re starting. Two paths:
Community & support
Section titled “Community & support”Running a mint is easier with people to ask. Bring questions, share what you’ve built, and tell us what’s broken.
Overview
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