Orchard

Orchard is a web application that unifies the components needed to operate a Cashu mint behind a single interface. Mint operators have historically run Bitcoin, Lightning, and ecash infrastructure through a fragmented mix of command-line tools, SQL queries, and separate dashboards. Orchard integrates Lightning Network Daemon (LND), Taproot Assets daemon (tapd), Cashu implementations including CDK and Nutshell, and an AI interface backed by Ollama as togglable modules in one operator-facing application. Its modular architecture lets operators start with a minimal subset and add services as they scale.

The AI component is Ollama-based and runs locally rather than calling a hosted model API. This keeps the language-model surface on the same machine as the mint's keys and Lightning channels, avoiding the operational and trust problem of routing mint commands through a third-party inference provider. The combination is unusual in the open AI stack: most local-LLM products sit on top of consumer hardware for personal use, while Orchard binds local inference to sovereign-money rails at the operator layer of a Bitcoin-adjacent protocol.

OpenSats funded Orchard in 2025, named in the foundation's year-in-review post dated June 2025. Per OpenSats, the funding supports adding revenue features and backups for Cashu mints, improving authentication and observability, hardening trust through event logs and multi-user support, extending Lightning support beyond LND to include Core Lightning (CLN), and building out the test suite, documentation, and revenue-model research for long-term sustainability.

The grant sits at the runtime, sovereignty-decentralization, and protocols cross-layers. It fits OpenSats' practice of funding AI-adjacent work specifically when the project is integrated with sovereign-money protocols, distinguishing it from general-purpose local-AI grants such as Mozilla Builders.