Since the turn of the year, the price of bitcoin has been battered with investors left to lick their wounds. Behind the scenes though, the development of Bitcoin has continued to defy market movements with the continuous development of the Lightning Network (LN), which has led to the creation of several bitcoin LN wallets.
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The Lightning Network ushered in the promise of easing network congestion by moving on-chain transactions to the second-layer protocol.
Here are some of the mobile wallets currently in development.
Eclair
Developed by Paris-based ACINQ, Lightning-ready Bitcoin wallet Eclair[2] currently has 3,000 wallet downloads, and it came about as a result of three years of working on Lightning. The Eclair wallet is a real Lightning node not a remote control app for a node running on a server. Users can transfer money from a checking to a savings account by closing channels, generate Lightning invoices, and pay Lightning invoices through QR codes or Lightning invoices.
Dominique Padiou, a software engineer at Eclair, told Bitcoin Magazine that payment route computation is made by the wallet itself, which creates better privacy, similar to the way a node on a server would.
At the moment, the wallet is outbound only. This is a deliberate move as the company believes users need a mobile Lightning wallet to make payments but not necessarily to receive payments. There are plans, however, to add a receiving feature in the future.
For now, funds stored in LN channels cannot be backed up through the app. Padiou said the company plans to "improve the performance of the wallet in the future, make it secure and add a backup mechanism for the LN channels." This wallet is only available on the Google Play Store[3].
