Today, we are releasing rawtx, a mobile lightning network wallet for Bitcoin. For now, it’s available on Android, with iOS version coming soon.

You can download it from Android Play Store.

We have produced 11 short videos (<1 min) showing all the different features on the app, you can see the playlist on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6M7JUIlnUqzfZQ4hxdFu2k912cKxWMqK.

Features (aka tl;dr)

  • You can send and receive testnet Bitcoins on blockchain and lightning network.
  • Support multiple wallets.
    • Each wallet is composed of 2 accounts: checking account and savings account.
      • Checking account = funds on lightning network, savings account = funds on blockchain.
      • This seemed the most intuitive way, because most people understand those concepts and understand that transferring funds between savings<->checking account takes time and some money. We are open to other ideas.
    • Only 1 wallet can run at any given time, but we are going to add possibility of running multiple wallets at the same time.
  • Pay lightning invoices by QR code or lightning invoice.
  • You can generate lightning invoices.
  • You can directly get testnet coins from the faucet.
  • Show outgoing and incomings payments on the lightning network.
  • Transfer money from checking account->savings account by closing channels.
  • Transfer money from savings account->checking account by creating channels to an existing peer or by QR code.
  • Displays lightning network information (number of nodes, edges, etc.).
  • Show a list of nodes and filter nodes by pubkey or alias.
  • lnd-as-a-service: runs lnd in the background (can run 24/7 if the wallet is open) and you can access the instance even outside the app by using the https certs and macaroons which are displayed in About screen.
    • The battery usage seemed reasonable in our testings, but this is just a start and it will keep improving.
  • Show lnd logs for debugging purposes.

 

Support

Our goal is to build the best lightning (and crypto) wallet ever made, so please let us know if you run into issues, have any feedback or think something could be done better!

Right now, we are mostly concerned with bugs related to crashes and lost funds (even though it’s only testnet). Performance/bandwidth and storage usage is our other priority.

 

How is my data used ?

We understand that users are concerned about how their data is used.

We did our best to preserve your privacy. We use neutrino, a privacy-preserving Bitcoin light client, to interact with the Bitcoin blockchain. We give you possibility to select the neutrino btcd server that you want to point to (needs to be roasbeef’s fork). We run a neutrino-compatible btcd instance which allows to sync very quickly, but if you want there’s also faucet.lightning.community node that you can point to. We didn’t include it by default, because we don’t own/run those servers.

Some of the lightning wallets set your alias in lnd.conf because it serves as marketing tool when looking through ln explorers, we decided against that for 2 reasons: it makes you a target if a vulnerability was discovered in our app or lnd and we think that if we do a kick-ass job, we won’t need the marketing that comes from ln explorers.

We don’t make network calls to any of our servers from the app (other than neutrino which you can change easily). We host our static site on github, we have plans to eventually make a call to rawtx.com/announcements.json URL to fetch important announcements to display, but if we do that we will give you ability to disable making that call.

In addition to all of that, we’ve decided against including libraries like crashlytics, libraries that helps us measure how the app is used or libraries that helps us control different flags of the app, because we want to keep our dependencies to a minimum and including those 3rd party libraries potentially exposes your data.

Those things make it difficult for us to debug crashes, etc, so we’ve given you a way to look through the logs by yourself and you vet and share it with us if you want us to take a look at it.

We ask for camera permissions when you want to scan a QR code, if you don’t want to use that functionality, we will never ask for camera permissions.

 

Will it be open source ?

The major portion of this app is already open-source lnd. Lightning labs developers have done an amazing work on the lightning daemon, we’ve adapted it for mobile and put a UI built in react-native on top of it.

The app will be open-sourced at the same time of our iOS app release.

 

What’s the meaning of rawtx ?

rawtx stands for rawtransaction which refers to a blockchain transaction, lightning network is essentially a network of nodes messaging rawtransactions to each other that will eventually be committed to the blockchain.

 

What’s next ?

There’s so much to do, our priorities for now are:

  • Get iOS app (very soon!)
  • Create wallet diagnostics
    • While we currently show lnd logs, that requires quite a bit of technical knowledge to understand, we want to make a system which can help users quickly diagnose what’s wrong with a wallet on device.
  • Litecoin integration.
  • The never ending performance improvements, battery/bandwidth/storage reductions and bugfixes.