If you don’t run your own Bitcoin and Lightning node, you might want an easy way to use Lightning payments as well as Bitcoin. And to make it even more interesting, AQUA Wallet also gives you access to Liquid Bitcoin, another layer 2 solution, and at present there are very low fees. Consequently, I run my own Bitcoin and Lightning nodes which do afford you more privacy and control, but you also have to manually open, close and manage payment channels. And with Lightning, you have more privacy on payments, especially if your node is going through Tor. But if you wanted to make Lightning or Liquid Bitcoin payments easily, it’s hard to beat AQUA Wallet, which has an added benefit of being even more private, as transactions don’t show an amount or what asset was traded. Technically, the AQUA Wallet spending account is Liquid Bitcoin, but on the server side it can swap in and out of Lightning quickly and efficiently (there is also some stablecoin options). The downside is the Liquid Bitcoin account is semi-custodial, but its a multisig key arrangement where 11 of 15 servers would be required to cooperate with each other to steal your funds, and servers are run by distributed and reputable vendors and exchanges with sufficient and legal incentives not to steal your Liquid Bitcoin. So I wouldn’t worry about spendable amounts. And the Bitcoin wallet portion is self custodial, so you could swap back into Bitcoin where you have full control when not making purchases with Liquid or Lightning Bitcoin. Also worth noting, the wallet doesn’t allow using your own Electrum server, so you’re depending on their servers.
The wallet itself is open source, and if you stay behind Tor or a VPN they can’t identify you by IP. Also, this project started with Blockstream who stopped development, where an executive left taking the wallet under the new company JAN3. And unlike the Blockstream’s Green Wallet, no data is collected.
So playing with the wallet I loaded some Bitcoin and then swapped into Liquid Bitcoin.
And to test the the Lightning payments, I added a month to my Mullvad VPN account, and it worked perfectly and quickly.
I’ll include a video below on how to setup and use the wallet, but keep in mind this is an older video as you can tell by the Bitcoin price compared to my screenshot above. So at present there isn’t a lot of activity on the Bitcoin network and minimal fees are all that is needed to complete transactions. Over the last couple days of playing with wallets and purchasing items with Lightning, Bitcoin fees were usually around $0.23 for my transactions, 1 sat/vB. But the real reason to use Lightning is for financial privacy, so people can’t see your transaction and change coming back like with Bitcoin, especially if you’ve consolidated UTXOs and are holding a decent amount. So for an extremely easy way to use Liquid or Lightning Bitcoin, I would recommend AQUA wallet.
If you want to use just Lightning payments there is another option, Phoenix Wallet. You send Bitcoin to it and it converts it into a Lightning payment channel. On the positive, it’s full self custody, and it will work with your own Bitcoin Node running an Electrum server for the Bitcoin portion, adding privacy for the Bitcoin transactions. But the Lightning channel goes through one of ACINQ’s Lightning nodes, so you’re depending on them as well as their servers seeing your activity on Lightning, but they’ve been doing this for a long time and very reputable. But it’s also a simpler wallet to use for just Lightning payments. Consequently, I found it too simple and limited, though I added a month to Mullvad VPN quickly and easily with a Lightning payment before closing the payment channel and moving the Bitcoin back out. I wouldn’t use it myself, though on occasion I would use AQUA Wallet.