Blitz Wallet: Lightning Wallet Using Many Bitcoin Layers
Blitz Wallet is a Bitcoin Lightning wallet bringing different Bitcoin layers together (Lightning, Liquid, e-cash) for a smooth user experience.
How does Blitz Wallet work and why could it be a good wallet for Bitcoin newbies?
Problem: Finding the Right Wallet
There are many Bitcoin wallets available and recommending a specific one can be a difficult task.
Finding the right one depends on the use case and how much funds the user will store in the wallet.
You don't want to store large amounts on custodial wallets or solutions.
On the other hand, if you just send or zap very small payments, having your own Lightning channel might not be cost-effective.
Blitz is a wallet that automatically moves you higher on the sovereignty stack when the bitcoin balance in your wallet grows!
E-Cash for Small Balances
Let's say you're a new Bitcoin user and you download Blitz.
You have no balance in the wallet.
If you have e-cash toggled on in the app and you receive less than 1000 sats, the sats will automatically be e-cash tokens on your balance (found on the "Experimental" tab).
E-cash is a custodial scaling protocol for Bitcoin with private transactions.
If you're unfamiliar with Cashu, or Chaumian e-cash on Bitcoin, check out this earlier post I wrote: #688053
Liquid Network Bitcoin for Balances Below 500,000 to 1,000,000 Sats
If you exceed 2000 sats in your wallet, under the hood Blitz will move 1000 sats to your Liquid Network @liquid balance, and leaves 1000 sats for e-cash micropayments.
In the Blitz UI, Liquid balance is found on the "Bank" tab (interesting choice of words!).
Liquid Network is a federated sidechain of Bitcoin with its own trust trade-offs.
You can learn more about how Liquid works in this X thread I wrote in February 2024.
Opens a Self-Custodial Lightning Channel When You Exceed a Specified Balance
But.. self-custodial Lightning should be the goal for all self-sovereign Bitcoiners to make small payments!
Therefore, Blitz uses Breez SDK and Blockstream's @blockstream_official Greenlight to open a hosted Lightning channel for the user (if the user wants) if the wallet balance exceeds a specified amount (e.g. 500,000 or 1,000,000 sats).
You can learn more about Breez from this X thread I wrote in February 2024.
Blitz is self-custodial because you have written down your seed phrase!
If your channel gets force-closed, you can receive your funds on-chain.
The channel opening fee can be about 10,000 sats with current fee rates, so opening a large enough channel is recommended.
Once you have a Lightning channel open with enough liquidity for sending and receiving, Blitz treats all BTC as Lightning BTC.
You can also set a maximum channel opening fee you're willing to pay (by default 5000 sats).
If the fee exceeds that, your funds will stay on Liquid.
When receiving BTC, users can also choose which Bitcoin layer to use for the payment (not necessary though because Blitz does this on users' behalf!).
For all this back-and-forth between various Bitcoin layers Blitz uses a Bitcoin bridge Boltz @boltz in the back-end.
You can learn more about Boltz in this X thread I wrote in October 2023:
One downside for me when testing Blitz was that after my Lightning channel was opened, I couldn't receive Lightning payments instantly.
This was because I didn't have any inbound liquidity on my channel after the 500,000 sats deposit I made to open the channel.
Lightning channels need to be balanced, so that you have capacity for both outgoing and incoming payments.
I had to first make a Lightning payment from my new balance before I could receive again!
I believe I could have still received on Liquid though.
Point of Sale App and Integrations
Blitz wallet can be used as a point of sale app for receiving bitcoin.
You can set a store name and after that you can receive payments to a payment URL.
Employees of a store could use this URL to receive payments without them having access to the funds.
Blitz point of sale can accept Lightning, on-chain, Liquid or e-cash payments, and users don't have to be cognizant of which layer to use.
Just like credit card terminals don't really care whether you use Visa or Mastercard.
For some reason during my testing, I couldn't change my store name to "58k Gang Merch Store".
Instead, the app insisted on me keeping the default randomly generated store name.
Maybe a bug.. Blitz is still in beta after all.
"Store" tab on the right hand side of the dashboard gives users access to Bitcoin gift cards powered by The Bitcoin Company, ChatGPT credits payable with bitcoin, and integrations with sms4sats and LN VPN.
Still in Beta!
Blitz is available on iOS and Android for beta testing, and they instruct users to only put in funds that they're ok to lose.
The app is open-source and developed by Blake Kaufman with the UX/UI by Oliver Koblizek.
Some features that I missed (maybe these are forthcoming!):
→ Would be cool to import your Nostr graph and zap your contacts
→ Nostr Wallet Connect integration so Blitz could be used in other apps
→ set the e-cash threshold manually
Personal Bitcoin Security Advisor in Your Pocket!
Blitz is like a personal Bitcoin security advisor on your phone.
The more BTC you accumulate, the higher towards self-sovereignty solutions it nudges you:
E-cash ➡️ Liquid ➡️ Lightning
But the user just sends and receives while the app does everything on the background.
No more of that "Ok, so once you have this and that amount of sats you have to download this new wallet.. and then after you have stacked this amount you should move to this wallet etc."
What do you think of Blitz Wallet?
Have you tried it already?
How did you like the UX?
Are Bitcoin wallets like this the future?
Additional Resources
"BLITZ WALLET - How Do You Use This New Wallet For FAST And CHEAP Bitcoin Transactions?", video tutorial by BTC Sessions @BTCsessions