Excerpt
Explore the AQUA Wallet with me – a self-custodial wallet that handles Bitcoin, Lightning, and USDt and other assets on Liquid. Started at Blockstream and now released by JAN3, AQUA is a considerable option for those who use stable coins, especially in places with volatile currencies like Zimbabwe. Learn about AQUA’s features, how it manages transactions, and how it compares to other wallets.
Transcript
Will you be supporting AQUA Bitcoin wallet? I’m somewhat confused by AQUA. Is it a Blockstream or a JAN3 product? Yeah, I’ve been waiting for AQUA several months as I was looking for it as an alternative when the BlueWallet deprecated its Lightning accounts in April 2023. And it seems that they worked towards a great date for it to launch because the wallet was released this week on Bitcoin’s 15th birthday, on January 3rd in 2024. And January 3rd is the day in which in 2009, the first public block of Bitcoin was mined. And it’s also the name of the company that is issuing or developing the AQUA wallet. What is Aqua? It’s a self-custodial wallet that was originally developed by Blockstream. And at that time, a guy called Samson Mow was working for Blockstream. And when he left Blockstream to found his own company JAN3, he seems to have taken AQUA with him. It’s not a Blockstream project anymore. It’s a JAN3 project. However you say that name, I don’t know. And a handful of people have already tested it, and I will include it into my Lightning wallet test that I’m conducting here in Zimbabwe at the moment. But from what I’ve learned so far, AQUA supports transactions in USDT, which is Tether, which runs also on Liquid. So it also supports Liquid, of course Bitcoin, Lightning, and other Liquid assets, because Liquid is a technology where you can even issue your own tokens. So there are other assets also running on Liquid. AQUA can be a great tool, I believe, for people who are interested in using stable coins like Tether, which the majority of people, for instance, as I have learned in Zimbabwe, are doing when they are using cryptocurrencies, because they know the value of the US dollar and it’s very stable compared to their own currencies. And that’s why a lot of people are using it. And for that, AQUA might be a great wallet because then you can use all assets like Bitcoin, Liquid, Lightning and Tether in one wallet. And AQUA is technically not a Lightning wallet. You can send and receive all assets, also Lightning, but there is no Lightning node within the wallet as you have it in Phoenix, Zeus, Green, or Mutiny. And as I mentioned before, you can use Boltz.exchange or SideSwap to swap between Liquid, Lightning and Bitcoin. And you don’t have to do that with AQUA because AQUA includes, it has basically the Boltz.exchange built within its wallet in the background. And every Lightning payment is basically a Liquid payment that is instantly swapped to Lightning. That means that Lightning payments with AQUA will be a little bit more expensive than Lightning payments if you already have an open channel, as you need to pay for the Liquid transaction fees. So if you have an open Lightning channel already, then I guess paying with Lightning over a wallet like Phoenix or Mutiny might be less costly than using the AQUA wallet for your Lightning payments. In general, Liquid transaction fees are much lower than Bitcoin transaction fees. They cost much less, but on the other hand, they are a little bit higher than Lightning payments. So there are really a lot of trade offs and a lot of different features in all the wallets that are existing. It’s very difficult to recommend one specific wallet as there is no best solution for a person because that’s actually the first question you need to ask yourself or someone else. If you’re an educator, what is the goal that this person wants to achieve with the wallet? That’s much more important than exactly knowing all the features, the details of a wallet, and knowing what’s going on in the background, because it will definitely depend on your use case and your goals, what your optimal wallet is. And I hope to produce content, a test, that is giving you a great overview over the different wallets, Lightning wallets I mentioned before.