Four Types of Lightning Wallets In this discussion, “Lightning wallet” is used in a broad sense: any wallet that can send and receive Lightning payments is considered a Lightning wallet. 1. Lightning node wallets hosted on servers, such as Alby Hub. These typically have frontend wallets like Alby Go and Zeus. In this setup, the Lightning node runs on a server as the backend, while the phone wallet is just the frontend user interface, calling the backend Lightning node wallet. This is the most native form of a Lightning wallet. 2. Lightning wallets that run a Lightning node on the phone, such as Phoenix, Blixt, Breez, and Zeus (Zeus now functions both as a full mobile Lightning wallet and can also connect to a server-side Lightning wallet purely as a frontend). These wallets often rely on an LSP. Unlike a server-based Lightning wallet, a mobile Lightning wallet cannot remain online continuously. The two categories above are native Lightning wallets, where users open and manage their own Lightning channels. 3. Submarine-swap / nodeless Lightning wallets: Cashu Wallet, Aqua, Spark Wallet, Ark Wallet, Muun. These wallets do not require users to create channels. Users send and receive Lightning payments via the service provider’s channels, and BTC is stored as Ecash BTC, Liquid BTC, Spark BTC, Ark BTC, or on-chain BTC, rather than LN channel BTC. 4. Fully custodial Lightning wallets, such as Wallet of Satoshi (which now also supports Spark Wallet). As @Giacomo Zucco put it, “Lightning Network: the unified language for invoicing/swapping/routing across different Bitcoin security models!” Therefore, the latter two types—though they might not appear to be Lightning wallets at first glance—can also be regarded as Lightning wallets. View quoted note →

- Change the encryption key for each message. - Change the sending address for each message. - Change the receiving address for each message. - Change the sending relay for each message. - Change the receiving relay for each message. This was the ultimate thought experiment we conducted early on regarding Keychat's message metadata privacy protections. However, we haven't yet tried changing the sending/receiving relay for messages. View quoted note →

Naming it Keychat (Key + Chat) used up all our spark. We riffed on Bitcoin’s wordplay (Bit + Coin). Still craving ideas. 😅 View quoted note →

“How can Keychat Wallet receive sats via LN but there is nothing about managing channels and liquidity?” 👇 View quoted note →

Keychat is the only project we’re building — and we’re committed to continuously improving it. View quoted note →

This is the core design philosophy behind Keychat. View quoted note →

We made a five-minute overview video of Keychat to help viewers understand its overall design.

Keychat user data (seed phrase, ID, contacts, chat history, wallet, etc.) can be downloaded from App Settings and imported into Keychat on other devices. All of this data only stays on your device and isn’t uploaded to any relay servers. Keychat uses the relay only to forward encrypted messages and the MLS key package (public-key data). Note that the same Chat ID cannot be used on two devices at once, since Signal and MLS keep generating new encryption keys, so the state keeps updating. Right now, if you run Keychat on your phone and your computer at the same time, you’ll have two different Chat IDs on the devices. Keychat hasn’t implemented cross-device sync for a single Chat ID yet.

It’s completely possible to use Keychat even without any ecash sats. View quoted note →

Based on feedback from many users, we’ve also realized that having only a Cashu ecash wallet in Keychat isn’t enough. We’re exploring a way to connect users’ existing Lightning wallets to Keychat — with Keychat serving purely as the front-end UI, while the wallet itself continues to run on the user’s own server or desktop. (Screenshot from the Alby extension) We’re also exploring Ark. View quoted note →