Mutiny Wallet FAQ
Moving from lightning custodians can be a different experience than you're used to in the self-custodial lightning world. There are a lot of nuances and edge cases that we do our best to abstract. We go through some of these in this FAQ guide.
We appreciate all the new users, conversations, and questions! It takes a lot of work to get to them all.
Moving from lightning custodians can be a different experience than you're used to in the self-custodial lightning world. There are a lot of nuances and edge cases that we do our best to abstract, but some bubble back up as limitations that don't make for a great UX. A few of the common ones are below.
FAQ
Accessing funds
Remember to back up your seed phrase! This is the only way you can redeem your funds, and if you delete the app or your browser storage cleared, you will not be able to access your funds without it. We will be unable to assist you either. Mutiny Wallet is a self-custodial wallet. Only you can access your funds.
The Lightning node runs on your device as well, whether that is the website, android app, or soon to release iOS app (testflight available to Mutiny+ users).
100k sat minimum
Lightning depends on transactions with the base layer to establish a channel. Higher chain fees make it not worth opening a channel for less. Ideally, you start with even more than that, considering there is a 40k sat fee (which will be dynamic soon) when you receive into Lightning for the first time and consecutive times if you need a new channel for more inbound liquidity. If you have the sats for it, we'd recommend 250k - 1M.
It's asking for another channel fee again
Like the last point, you need a new channel if you do not have enough inbound. The LSP opens with an additional 100k sats of inbound. Unfortunately, with the current fee environment, much of this inbound is taken up with reserves needed for the LSP to close the channel eventually. In Lightning, the channel opener pays for the eventual fee. The high fee is also why the initial charge is approximately double a typical on-chain fee.
Payments instantly fail when you have enough balance to make the payment
Similar to the last point, if you were the one to open a channel to the LSP (from the on-chain swap screen), our channel reserve calculations are not currently considering the proper available balance you can send when factoring in the potential channel close fee. We need to update our channel screen to reflect these into the reserves for both of these issues. Unfortunately, your complete lightning balance is unavailable to send, and communicating it is tricky. We'll improve this.
Typically this might happen if you're around 30k sats or less with your balance, so topping up more should help.
Channel closes
This one feels the worst because a channel might close for many reasons, and it's not easy to be aware of them all. We have significantly lowered our channel closes in the last few weeks, but some may still pop up. The more common scenario is if you have a pending payment but do not come back online for a few days to check up on it. It can result in a channel closure.
Funds not immediately available after channel closure
If the previous issue happens and a forced closure occurs, it may take up to a few days to return to your on-chain balance. Lightning has a series of timelocks on-chain. When a force-close transaction happens, it requires some time for the counterparty to have a chance to double-check and resolve any potential issues. After a few days, you must come back online for your wallet to spend the funds back into your wallet to be available to spend. This will look like a "sweep" transaction in your wallet activity list.
Unexpected bugs
Those are the common ones, but more could exist! We're a small team of 3, and we've improved our wallet a ton over the last few months, but more bugs could remain. We are still considering this wallet beta, which you should know. If something goes wrong, in almost all cases, we've been able to assist the user in restoring their funds but be aware that this can happen. The best way to help is to open up an issue on our GitHub and submit logs.
Community
We're very active on Nostr, but we can't read and respond to every message. Another place we have a community is on our Matrix channel located here. We'd love for you to join and ask questions or be part of the community.
Conclusion
Thank you for trying out Mutiny, and we hope we can improve the points above soon. We have some integrations on the way to cut down on many initial pain points, but these will take time. Let us know if you have any other common issues not covered above!