Mutiny's new design puts people first

Mutiny has a new home screen and a bunch of new features that make it easier to make payments with your friends. You can start using it now on iOS, Android, and the web.

In our last big updates, we added nostr contact import and global search. People love how easy it is to search for someone and pay them. And now we're taking these ideas further.

Most lightning wallets these days are what we call "invoice-oriented." To receive money you generate an invoice and copy and paste it into a chat message, or have a friend scan your phone. To send money you can scan a QR code, or copy and paste an invoice into your wallet. It works, but it's far from an ideal user experience.

Because what are you trying to do? You want to pay a person or a business, not a jumble of letters and numbers. The jumble of letters and numbers are an important implementation detail, but they're not the point of a wallet. And we think we can make bitcoin payments accessible to a wider audience by focusing on people, not invoices.

A people-oriented wallet

The best open protocol we have right now for online identity is nostr. A private key you control, controlling a public identity anyone can interact with. You can use that identity to post memes, and you can also use that identity to signal with cryptographic certainty how you want to be paid.

The new version of Mutiny now allows you to create a new nostr profile, or import a nostr private key from an existing profile. Having a nostr private key in the wallet enables one of our biggest new social payment features: chat.

Mutiny now includes nostr DMs. You can send and request money from anyone on nostr. Payment requests are simply an invoice sent as a chat message. Payment requests from friends that you follow will show up on your Mutiny home screen so you can pay them with a tap. No more copy / pasting invoices!

As we rely more heavily on nostr identities, we also want to make it a two-way street: Mutiny is now a great way to start using nostr. You can get a nostr private key that's generated by your wallet, and then bring that key to any other nostr app. Your nostr contact list can also be imported into other supported wallets such as Zeus.

Social payments on the home screen

To double down on this social experience, we've redesigned our home screen to put people first. We now include a row of recent profiles you've paid for quick access. We also now have tabs on the home screen for looking at your payment activity, your friend's zap activity on nostr, and your payment requests.

The new design also has a unified balance at the top. This balance combines your on-chain, lightning, and fedimint funds into one nice big number.

Find a federation

Mutiny has had experimental support for the fedimint protocol for a couple of months now. Ever since we started investigating fedimint, we've been blown away by how many of the user experience problems it solves.

For instance, fedimint makes it so much easier to receive your first sats. Instead of opening a lightning channel on your first receive, with a minimum of 100k sats to get started, you can get started on a fedimint with as few as 1 sat.

This new update adds a way to discover available fedimints to join. Naturally, the discovery process is powered by an open protocol built on nostr. You can see who recommends a federation, and add it with one click.

As this system matures and more mainnet federations come online we hope to improve web of trust recommendations. For now, do your own research and be careful which federations you trust with your funds.

Adding a fedimint turns your Mutiny wallet into a hybrid: you'll automatically receive funds to that fedimint, as long as the amount is smaller than 200,000 sats, and you'll automatically spend out of that fedimint, with a fallback to your regular lightning balance. You can also swap from fedimint to your lightning balance at any time.

If you've ever wanted to try Mutiny without all of the channel friction or high upfront fees, now's the perfect time to do so.

What's next

Fedimint is also helping us with the last big piece of the social payments puzzle: lightning address. With fedimint, it's possible to have a lightning address that receives funds on your behalf, locked to your nostr pubkey. When you come online your wallet will automatically sweep those funds into your ecash balance.

Lightning address is what makes it so simple to send to anyone on nostr, so, of course, we want to support it in our wallet for receives. We're very close to being ready to launch lightning address for Mutiny, so stay tuned.

Mutiny+ subscribers will get first access to lightning address. You can join Mutiny+ in app, or if you're using iOS you can sign up here.

For now, you can add any other lightning address to the nostr profile you create with Mutiny.

Feedback wanted

We think we're getting close to building a non-custodial social payments app the right way: a strong nostr foundation to make the experience people-oriented, and federations to make it easier to get started with your first sats.

We'd also like to thank the fine folks from our cohort at Sovereign Engineering who helped us refine, test, and imagine some of this new experience.

But we need your help to make sure this works well for everyone. There's a feedback button in the app if you'd like to share with us anonymously, or you can join our Discord server to hang out with the Mutiny community. It will go a long way to help steer us in the right direction for the months to come.