Federated Lightning Addresses for Mutiny+ Users
We're happy to announce that we're launching the preview version for Mutiny+ users!
Lightning Addresses have always been a long-awaited feature for Mutiny Wallet, and we're happy to announce that we're launching the preview version for Mutiny+ users!
Lightning Addresses
Lightning Addresses are a quick and easy way to discover friends by name and pay them directly without requesting an invoice. We use this feature heavily when paying people, but we have been unable to provide this service to receive money into Mutiny Wallet until now!
The hard part about providing Lightning Addresses to a non-custodial wallet is that they require a web server to run, and the wallet must be online 24/7. When you close Mutiny, it can no longer generate invoices, so these would fail if we provided this feature.
Federated Lightning Addresses
Introducing Federated Lightning Addresses!
Inspired by Kody Low's Hermes project, we mimic the functionality to provide a trust-minimized way to offer Lightning Addresses backed by Fedimint. The Hermes server will create ecash locked to your wallet's public key so that only you can spend it when you come back online.
Your wallet will listen on nostr for these pubkey-locked ecash tokens and then unlock them for you. Afterward, you may sweep them into your self-custodial Lightning channel or keep them in the federation.
We've also added blinded authentication tokens to our Hermes server to separate your wallet identity from the name of the Lightning Address you registered. We keep your Lightning Address as private as possible while providing this service. We'll write another article on the technical details of how this works.
Signing Up
To sign up for this service, it requires two things:
- A Federation (and don't change it for now)
- Subscription to Mutiny+
We will open up this service more after getting enough feedback from our early supporters. Once you subscribe to Mutiny+ one time and sign up for an address, you keep that address for life. If you unsubscribe later, this does not affect your Mutiny address.
Fedimint is required for this feature to work, so you must add one before adding a Lightning Address. For this first MVP, there's also a requirement that you do not change the federation you had when you added the Lightning Address. We will support this in a later release. If you change it, you'll stop receiving funds from your Lightning Address, and you'll have to change it back to the original federation.
If you're on iOS, we do not support subscribing from inside the app. However, if you go to https://plus.mutinywallet.com and sign in with your Mutiny Wallet, you can pay for the service right on the website. It should reflect that you're a plus subscriber the next time you open Mutiny.
Afterward, add a federation and click "Create Mutiny Address" to pick a unique name!
Try it out, and let us know what you think! We'll integrate this into the sign-up flow later and open this service to randomly generated names for everyone. This feature will take time as we stress-test it and work out the kinks. If you have any issues at all, please let us know!
Thank you!