TL;DR: We’ve been heads down shipping at Boltz. This post is a pause-and-reflect on how far we’ve come and what we need to do to build upon the momentum we have gained in the past six months.
A lot has happened in these past months. Amidst the world going through a pandemic, FED brrrinting money like it’s nobody’s business, stocks making the crypto market look like a day at grandma’s house, and Kanye running for president, 2020 continues to bemuse us. The Bitcoin lightning community, however, knows that it’s time to build, and has made silent, but significant progress. There are more than 13k public LN nodes now with about 1k BTC in channel capacity. These numbers inspire confidence for the future of the Lightning network and motivate many like us to continue building towards the common goal to create the money and payment system of the future.
Make measurable progress in reasonable time
Measuring progress is an important part of a startup’s journey. If we can quantify and analyze our progress, we can precisely gauge our efficiency and holistically judge how far off we are from achieving our goals. To do so in a transparent manner, we’ve listed six major achievements we have unlocked in the past six months.
1. Boltz.exchange got a facelift 🎉
We shipped a new and revamped frontend for Boltz with a much-improved user interface across desktop and mobile platforms. This was one of our main focuses in the past few months. One of the support issues we had to repeatedly deal with was users not being able to immediately refund in case of a swap failure. The lightning network is still in its nascent stage and routing errors are a common cause of failed swaps. In such cases of failed normal submarine swaps (on-chain to LN), the user could use the refund file downloaded during the swap to claim back the on-chain coins that they sent. Due to the nature of hashed time-locked contracts, the refund could only be triggered after a certain number of blocks were mined, which resulted in confused users trying to refund a swap immediately after the failure, but to no avail. We fixed this in our revamped website, where the users are now acutely made aware of the number of blocks and approximate time they need to wait before they can initiate a refund. The frontend also saves the refund files of the latest swaps in localstorage of the browser. We ironed out many prevalent issues like these and other points of friction in the user journey — which significantly improves our net NPS score. The revamped Boltz website is a progressive web app, which makes using Boltz on mobile a native app-like experience. We will continue to iterate on the feedback we have received to build on our promise of providing the best user experience while retaining the non-custodial and private nature of Boltz swaps.
2. RTL integration of Boltz — PR ready 🥳
As a Lightning Service Provider, one of our goals is to partner with projects in the space and provide value to their end-users. Ride the Lightning (RTL) is a full-function, device-agnostic, web user interface to help manage lightning node operations. People running LND, c-lightning, or eclair node implementation of the lightning network can access their node via a web interface to actively manage it. We realized that Boltz can add a lot of value to these lightning power users who want an easy way to on and off-ramp themselves from the lightning economy in a self-custodial and trust minimized manner. Our integration with RTL adds the Boltz channel deposit and withdrawal feature and as an additional choice to the lightning loop integration. Channel creation swaps, our novel, and self-custodial way to obtain a balanced lightning channel with a simple on-chain transaction is coming to RTL soon as well. See #6.
3. Electrum integrates Boltz ✌
Electrum, one of the oldest Bitcoin wallets, released a new version of the wallet, which supports Boltz submarine swaps out of the box. This is a huge win for privacy in Bitcoin. We worked closely with the Electrum team to get this shipped by adding needed features and improving documentation on the way. Our API is now more robust than ever before and ready for devs to hack around with.
4. We were featured on Fulmo’s PotzBlitz podcast 👁️
Fulmo’s PotzBlitz is a weekly lightning talk podcast while the world is in lockdown. Its purpose is to create a sense of community, update the viewers on the latest developments in the lightning world, and give creators a platform to showcase their project. We were honored to be invited to talk about running a privacy first, account-free crypto exchange. We talked about everything from our vision to technology and went deep into the architecture of submarine swaps. We would like to thank Jeff from Fulmo and Dennis from Bitwala for hosting us. Here are the slides from this talk.
5. Decentralized liquidity aggregator Exchange Union’s daemon integrates Boltz — making it default choice to power lightning deposits 😎
Exchange Union, is an open-source project building xud — the reference implementation powering OpenDEX, which is a decentralized exchange built on top of the Lightning and Connext network. xud brings individual traders, market makers, and exchanges onto OpenDEX to form a single global trading network and liquidity pool, in a bid to counter fragmented liquidity problem persistent across modern-day exchanges.
Using Boltz, market makers running the XUD docker environment can directly get balanced channels and deposit or withdraw from their lightning channels using a simple command or upcoming WebUI interface.
6. An epic feat: Channel Creation Swaps 🎊
Our latest Boltz Ragnarok release bundles a landmark feature: Channel Creation swaps. We published a detailed post on it. The fact that the user can now get a balanced lightning channel from the get-go while retaining the self custodial and private nature of the Boltz swaps is quite revolutionary in itself. Channel creation swaps are a type of normal submarine swap — which means that lapp developers can build a seamless user experience on top of the same API endpoint primitive. Some wallets and projects are in the final stages of integrating it, which makes this feat a highlight of our past few months at Boltz.
What’s next
As the world recovers from the pandemic and the economy bounce back, we are hopeful that the lightning projects will gain even more momentum. This building streak of the past few months has given us lots of headways and we plan to capitalize on it by carrying on with the shipping mode. Our next major release will feature the integration of a BTC/USDT pair. This will increase our targeted userbase as an exchange. A stablecoin integration means Boltz traders will be able to use Boltz to shield themselves from the volatility of the market. If you have any questions, feel free to hit us up on Twitter or Discord.
Until next time, happy swapping!
Team Boltz
