TL; DR: No delays when launching the app (network sync, route calculation, etc). Open the app and pay instantly, as simple as that!

Let’s imagine that you’re using Lightning to pay for your morning coffee. Every morning when you open your Lightning wallet, you need to sync network updates. This consumes bandwidth, drains your battery and takes time. Then you need to find a payment route to your coffee place’s Lightning node. This also drains your battery and takes time. Meanwhile, customers are queuing behind you, waiting to pay for their own coffee and wondering why this is taking forever.

…

TL; DR: Each time channels are updated, Phoenix sends an encrypted version of their data to its peer. This allows for easy backup/restore of channels while maintaining privacy.

On a traditional Bitcoin wallet, backup is as simple as writing down a list of words, once and for all. It is not as simple with Lightning because backups need to be updated after each transaction. It’s also very tricky because from a protocol point of view, restoring an out-of-date backup is the same as a cheating attempt, and will result in your peer taking all your funds.

For Eclair Mobile, we…

TL; DR: When you receive a Lightning payment, we will automatically and instantly create a channel to you if needed, solving the inbound liquidity issue.

Let’s suppose you just installed Phoenix. Your balance is zero, you have no channels. How can you receive your first payment? It’s easy: just go to the receive tab and display a LN payment request.

Wait, what just happened? How was the sender able to route a payment to you if there was no channel to route to? Let’s see what happened.

The way Lightning works, payments are routed through channels, which could be public…

TL; DR: Phoenix is a non-custodial Lightning Wallet that offers the same UX as a good old Bitcoin wallet.

Today we are releasing Phoenix, a 2nd-generation mobile Lightning Wallet.

Why do you call it a 2nd-generation wallet?

When we first announced Eclair Mobile back in 2017, we chose to make it a standard Bitcoin wallet with opt-in Lightning support. Eclair Mobile has a pretty UI, but the UX still lets you see a lot of the inner workings of Lightning. For example, users see separate on-chain and off-chain balances, have to manage channels, incoming liquidity, and so on.

With Phoenix, we started again from scratch — hence the…

TL; DR: We have enabled receive on Eclair Mobile Testnet 0.4.0, with a background watcher mechanism and a basic liquidity service.

In our last blog post we explained the reasons which led us to limit Eclair Mobile to only sending money until now. There were three of them:

• For mobile users, the #1 use case for Lightning is to send payments;
• It is far safer, because it saves us from monitoring the blockchain;
• Inbound liquidity is necessary to receive funds and we don’t have the tools to address this yet.

In other words, if we want to enable receive on…

TL; DR: Eclair Wallet is now Eclair Mobile, with background routing sync and custom Electrum server support. Reception of funds over Lightning will be enabled in 2019.

We decided to rename Eclair Wallet to Eclair Mobile because the former name was too generic and regularly caused confusion among our users. Hopefully it will be clearer now:

• Eclair is a full LN node implementation, it is intended to run on a desktop or server. It is the software that powers the ACINQ node, one of the oldest, most reliable and most connected nodes in the network.
• Eclair Mobile is a Bitcoin…

TL; DR: Latest release of Eclair Wallet Testnet includes automated encrypted backups using Google Drive. Will be rolled out to mainnet ASAP.

A bit #Reckless until now

Until now, upon installing Eclair Wallet for Android, a huge scary disclaimer warned users that funds allocated to Lightning channels weren’t being backed up. In other words, funds stored in channels would be lost if the user uninstalled the app, or even deleted application data, or simply lost their phone with open channels (of course, on-chain funds are always protected by the seed and can be recovered).

Backing up Lightning channels is difficult

The reason for this is that backing up Lightning channels is…

TL; DR: We are releasing Strike, an API and dashboard that makes it easy to accept Lightning payments on Bitcoin Mainnet. Fee is 1% and automated withdrawals are free.

A few months ago we announced Strike, an easy to use, stripe-like API for Lightning. It was only available for Bitcoin testnet, and today we open it on Bitcoin mainnet.

Why an API for Lightning?

The Lightning Network is a high performance trustless payment network built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. It enables instant payments with very low fees, even for very small amounts.

We are proud members of the Lightning development community, and we…