Mutiny Wallet is Shutting Down

It's been a very reflective few months, and I have much to share. I hope to have your grace and support while updating you on this.

tldr: Our company is exploring alternative products, we'll be shutting down the wallet at the end of the year but you can still self host.

Our journey with Mutiny Wallet began with the unique idea of being the 'Coldcard of Lightning.' This concept was born at Pleb Lab during a casual lunch in the breakroom, where Ben, Paul, and I first discussed it.

Later, it became a very experimental privacy lightning wallet called PLN, built at the BTC++ hackathon. Over many months, we got it on mainnet. We realized that the usability was very difficult and threw it all away. However, the motivation for it was still very strong. We know lightning can be used more privately, and we wanted to prove that and use it ourselves.

Half a year later, while working part-time at our contracting company, Bitcoin Dev Shop, I got the opportunity to join Paul at Voltage to build out the LSP they wanted and one we could use at Mutiny. During the "bolt.fun" hackathon, we came up with the crazy idea of compiling a lightning wallet into a website because our Apple dev account got incorrectly flagged as sanctioned without recourse. I still have the texts: "fuck it dude, let's go to the web."

That was a crazy idea that turned real when we came 2nd place out of ~70 at that hackathon over the course of 6 weeks. The next few months after that, we spent incorporating the company and fundraising. As three first-time founders, we had no idea what we were doing and, quite frankly, barely do today, about 18 months later.

Regardless, we were able to incorporate, raise $300k, ship a mainnet-ready beta wallet a few months later, apply for open-source grant funding, and then raise another $500k at the end of 2023. Raising was one of the hardest things we've done far beyond the tech, in a tough time raising funds in this industry. As much as I'd like to take credit for it, it's only by the grace of God and a handful of faithful supporters and believers that kept us alive. We cannot be thankful enough.

We excel at taking very experimental ideas and tech stacks, smashing them together, and creating something people can use in new ways. This is one of our founding principles and unique selling points.

With a strategy like this, sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. Over the past year, we've encountered numerous challenges and tried to solve them in innovative ways.

We have built a multi-device, local-first, and redundant synchronization data store that has protected the lightning state of nearly 50k lightning nodes over a year. It was not perfect originally but has gotten quite good about 6 months in, to the point that we've not had to fulfill a single refund due to revoked justice transactions. This allows Mutiny to run as a full node on multiple devices at nearly the same exact time, a first of its kind in this industry.

We've achieved significant milestones, including building one of the first Fedimint wallets and the first hybrid Fedimint + self-custodial lightning wallet. A trust-minimized federated lightning address server. A lightning subscription platform. One of the only self-custody nostr zapping wallets. A blinded authentication client used to protect the user's identity from paid services. A new Bitcoin signet instance used by many developers and companies with hundreds of nodes. We have about a dozen distributed microservices on multiple platforms worldwide, providing services to about 500 - 1000 daily active lightning wallets.

We've been working towards making lightning easy for ordinary people. This has been challenging for us and progressively more complex over time. However, we've learned much about ourselves, our users, and our technical, physical, and mental limitations, which reassures us about our potential.

We've done a lot of reflecting, and we know what we currently have is not living up to the promise. We know it won't be capable of doing that at scale, and we know we're unable to continue supporting it as is. It's time to fix what's broken, and the first step is to identify what's actually broken.

For one, I've fallen out of love for Bitcoin and the industry. I'm burnt out and unable to continue on as CEO. While we have been figuring out what we should do, Ben has found some great opportunities for himself, which we fully support and understand as he transitions. Marks, our new CPO, has agreed to step up as CEO as he is way more equipped than I am and has the expertise to back it. I'll focus on what I do best, which is backend code and architecture, as CTO. Paul will be jumping back into the Chef Paul Officer role and is excited about the new products ahead of us.

We've gone back to the drawing board and taken into account what we've built successfully and what we've not. Consumer-facing applications in a very technically challenging environment with a very small team and resources are not for us. Our focus is on building services and tools for our needs and others.

We have explored many options and are still determining what it'll look like for us. The first decision we've come to is to take the things that have worked well and have been unsolved for others and to figure out how to turn them into services and platforms. While our dream wallet is still unbuilt, some of what we have can empower others to build out their dream wallets or apps. Our next steps are to theorize about what is needed the most, talk to companies and developers, solve their problems, and mass market the solution for any privacy & security-
critical applications.

Mutiny Wallet will be winding down in the coming months, with a cut-off date at the end of the year. If you want to continue using the wallet, you will have to self-host it. We will stop hosting the web app, remove the apps from Apple and Google, and shut down any other service that helps power the wallet. Maintenance and support from us will wind down as well, and it'll be up to the community of self-hosters to keep it alive if they want it. More info regarding the shutdown and the timeline will come soon.

While it's very difficult to say these words, we're very excited about not just a new chapter ahead but an entirely new book. Thank you all again for your support and belief. Many critical conversations with supporters have helped us during this time, and we greatly appreciate it. Most importantly, I want to thank Paul, Ben, and Marks for jumping onto this crazy ship with me. I'm excited to continue forward.