Adding Lightning to Crypto Is a Piece of Cake with the Breez SDK
Lightning is indisputably bitcoin. It’s the best way to use bitcoin as a currency, and it’s bitcoin’s best chance to go mainstream. But unlike bitcoin, Lightning has been relatively sheltered from the broader crypto world through lack of contact. Technical and largely cognitive barriers have kept them separate. In that sense, Lightning has almost worked as a closed beta used by a tight community of early adopters.
This is a massive opportunity passing us by. Introducing Lightning to the broader world of crypto will help more users interface with Bitcoin, and Lightning is the tech that can put the currency into “cryptocurrency.” Bringing crypto and Lightning together is an inevitable step on the way to mainstreaming Bitcoin. So what’s holding us all back?
If technical and cognitive barriers are what’s keeping them apart, then what we need is proof that they can and do work well together. This does not require adding other tokens to Lightning. It would be enough to show that bitcoin over Lightning is a valuable complement to a multicoin wallet.
In terms of proof, our latest partnership with Cake Wallet is as good as a DNA sample. Cake Wallet prioritizes privacy, autonomy, integrity, and simplicity. The Breez SDK is the technology that enables Lightning to be integrated into almost any app in almost any vertical. It makes bitcoin payments available to anyone anywhere, starting with Cake Wallet’s hundreds of thousands of users, and expands to all future users who download the application.
Are you feeling a little FOMO about how quickly the future is becoming the present? Good. We all should.
Cake Wallets: The Avatar of Crypto Wallets
Cake Wallet puts users first. It’s a multicoin wallet with a curated selection of currencies, and it already runs on iOS, Android, and MacOS, and the Windows/Linux version is in beta. The interface is clean (and pretty), it runs smooth and fast, and the built-in exchange lets users move back and forth between currencies seamlessly. It works on whatever machine the users want and lets them manage those currencies as they choose without extraneous complexity.
It should come as no surprise that Cake Wallet runs so well since the Cake Wallet team built it to serve their own needs. It started in 2017 when Vik, the founder, discovered that there was no way to hold Monero in self-custody on iOS. So he built the app that he wanted to use.
The inspiration to add Lightning was similar. One member of the Cake Wallet team had wanted to pay with bitcoin at his favorite Brazilian joint for a while, but the restaurant (Lily’s — looks great; can’t wait to try it) only accepted BTC via Lightning. However, Cake Wallet— his favorite wallet and the company he works for — didn’t have Lightning functionality. Settling a restaurant bill in seconds with bitcoin is exactly the kind of transaction where Lightning surpasses on-chain bitcoin and virtually any other crypto.
Adding Lightning to Cake Wallet, providing faster and cheaper bitcoin payments, would respond to a clearly lacking use case. So that’s exactly what Cake Wallet has done.
People sometimes say that the best gift to give is the one you yourself would like to receive. That’s exactly how Cake Wallet designs for their users, i.e. based on their own needs.
That, folks, is how you attract half a million users performing monthly transactions valued in the mid-nine figures.
Build a great app that meets real needs, and people will use it. A lot.
Cake Wallet Knew the Destination; Breez Is the Map
The Cake Wallet team knew what they were getting into when they decided to integrate Lightning. Adding Lightning functionality from scratch would have been overwhelming. It would have required the manpower that only the biggest global exchanges have to spare.
But not only did the Breez SDK provide the functionality Cake Wallet needed, it made the process easy. The devs especially appreciate that the SDK was built for developers by developers. They cite the clear and helpful documentation, the source scripts, and the handy examples as especially helpful tools in getting Lightning up and running quickly and smoothly.
In fact, they said that the hard part was learning Lightning because its architecture differs from a lot of other crypto they were familiar with. But once they had gronked Lightning, the SDK was almost self-explanatory. One especially awesome dev even said “Breez is the way to go. It’s a breeze to implement.” (If he weren’t already so great with code, he’d have a bright future in marketing.)
That’s gratifying to hear. We’ve always prioritized the user experience, and our SDK partners are our users. We work hard to facilitate the process of integrating the SDK with thorough documentation and rapid support. It’s nice to hear that people notice and that it’s really making their work easier.
Beyond the helpful learning materials, the SDK ticked a number of other non-negotiable boxes on Cake Wallet’s list. It’s open source, it doesn’t compromise between a seamless user experience and self-custody, and it solves all the problems of integrating Lightning with a single package. Sending/receiving, swaps, BOLT 11 payments, no channel management, free choice of LSPs, and an existing solution for async payments with improvements on the horizon — it’s all there.
They also value the open-LSP model. LSPs are an essential part of the Lightning Network. And the open-LSP model means that integrating the SDK doesn’t lock Cake Wallet into a walled garden. They remain free to choose and change LSPs as their users and business logic demand. There are no rug pulls in an open field.
For us, Cake Wallet is a welcome challenge. They’re a great team and easy to work with, but Cake Wallet operates at the scale of crypto — huge. Still, we’ve onboarded enough partners and LSPs that we know how to grow without overshooting our capacity. A big, new partner is just like a big, new payment channel: as long as you assemble all the pieces carefully before it goes live, scale is just another parameter.
Barriers between Lightning and Crypto Are All in Our Heads
With the partnership between Cake Wallet and the Breez SDK, Lightning is ready to play in the crypto world. It opens Lightning to millions of crypto users with nearly $3 trillion worth of liquidity across the currencies available on the Cake Wallet app.
Once you start eliminating barriers, it’s amazing how many things become possible that you never expected. That’s what’s happening now. Together with Cake Wallet, we’re tearing down barriers between Lightning and crypto. The ones who’ll profit most from this new field of opportunity are the users. Nice.
