We’re excited to share that StashPay is now in the Apple App Store!

📲 Please upgrade to the App Store version to receive updates if you were previously using TestFlight. We will sunset future updates from TestFlight.

Download here: https://apps.apple.com/app/stashpay/id6701591338

If you like the App, a review would help immensely. As always thank you for your feedback 🙏

A New Design

For the redesign I partnered up with my old colleague and friend Lee Gordon. He was the designer behind the purple branding and design of the Lightning Wallet that we worked on in 2018 at Lightning Labs after launching LND on bitcoin mainnet. It was an exciting time where the possibilities of the Lightning Network seemed limitless.

And we’ve always dreamed of finishing what we started all those years ago. The problem was the tech simply wasn’t ready back then and we’ve learned a lot about Lightning’s limitations since. But what’s exciting is the evolution and energy is continuing with each new layer and protocol that is being built on Bitcoin.

Setting the Design System

When embarking on the creation of our new Bitcoin wallet, our primary objective was to craft a design that was as simple and intuitive in its operation as it was in its appearance. We envisioned a blank slate, enabling users to effortlessly navigate the fundamental processes of sending and receiving transactions without the added cognitive load often imposed by overly complex graphics and animations. Our inspiration gravitated towards the "less is more" philosophy, akin to the elegant simplicity seen in designs such as the "Nothing Phone," applied to the realm of wallets.

The "Less is More" Approach

Our design philosophy was deeply rooted in the concept of removing complexity to enhance the user experience. We believe that true sophistication lies in simplicity, and by stripping away extraneous elements, we could provide a clearer, more direct path for the user. This approach aligns with established design principles that advocate for minimalism, ensuring that every element serves a distinct purpose and contributes to the overall usability of the product. The goal was to eliminate distractions and focus on the core functionalities, allowing users to achieve their objectives with minimal effort.

The Result: Uncomplicated and User-Centric

What emerged from this design ethos is a wallet that stands as a simpler, more accessible bitcoin wallet than (we believe) currently exists. It is intentionally devoid of excessive color, overt branding, and any unnecessary complexities. Our guiding principle was to empower the user, allowing them to engage with the core functionalities seamlessly. We understood that complexity could be incrementally introduced later, based on user needs and evolving functionalities, rather than being an initial barrier.

This led us to a fantastically uncomplicated black-on-white palette. It is a blank canvas, inviting the user to imprint their own experience onto the bare minimum: send, receive, configure, done. This minimalist aesthetic not only contributes to a clean and uncluttered interface but also reduces visual fatigue and makes essential information more prominent. By focusing on the essentials, we aimed to create a robust and reliable tool that prioritizes user action and clarity above all else.

Let’s Talk Features

Fiat conversion for 113 currencies

The wallet now supports converting to sats from 113 different fiat currencies. This should make it usable for Bitcoin payments in some of the most remote corners of the globe even for niche currencies.

Unified QR Code for Lightning and On-Chain

By default the app will now also display a BIP21 unified QR code for both Bitcoin On-Chain and Lightning invoices. For receive amounts smaller than 25,000 sats the app will display a Lightning invoice, since Boltz requires at least 25k sats for On-Chain swaps. But this way new users aren’t burdened with protocol details the first time they want to receive some sats.

More advanced users can opt-in to manually toggling between On-Chain and Lightning in the app’s settings.

Download the Beta

Go to the StashPay website to download the redesigned app. And please remember this is beta software. So only use it with sats you are willing to lose.

Download Here

Onwards, stay humble, spend sats, and tell us what you think!

My Open Source Journey

In the previous 12 years of working as a developer and founder, I’ve built open source software in both grant funded as well as VC funded ventures. I started an email encryption startup in 2013, where I became core maintainer of OpenPGP.js an encryption library now used by over 100 million users in ProtonMail and the Mailvelope browser extension. I’ve contributed to one of the first self-custody lightning wallets at Lightning Labs and built the Photon key management infrastructure in the context of a Spiral grant. All built completely open source from day one. So why didn’t I start StashPay as open source?

In all those years, I hadn’t found a business model that works with open source. And when you watch VC funded startups use your code without paying while making demands and in some cases even acting like they did the work, you lose motivation. There are simply few open source business models that have proven to work for the software industry. In the absence of a business model many open source projects that start with good intentions end up turning against their user’s interest. Wordpress is just one recent example, Android is another. Without a revenue stream projects are incentivized to create a moat through vendor lockin or harvest and monetize user data.

Perhaps building a business isn’t my strength, but it was also never was my primary motivation. My conviction that open source was the right way to build things came first, while building a business model came second. For me a business was simply a vehicle to bring a product to life.

When I recently saw the indie hacker movement build and monetize small proprietary apps, I thought this might be a way to find a business model for a bitcoin wallet. I have now realized though that while this model may make sense for other domains like AI, I’m not sure it’s compatible with bitcoin wallets.

In bitcoin building open source is more than a licensing decision. It is an acknowledgement that we are all corruptible given the right incentives. To choose an open source license is to prevent future corruption of oneself and provide a backup plan to one’s users. It keeps us honest in the face of difficult decisions we have to make as programmers and business owners.

So, after doing some soul searching, I’ve decided to open source the StashPay wallet under the GPLv3 license. It just didn’t feel right to build a piece of software that allows users to handle their own money and data as closed source.

Users can now also verify that StashPay doesn’t take a cut of the fees from their payments. There actually isn’t even a server that StashPay currently operates. The wallet just connects to Electrum servers from Breez and Blockstream to fetch bitcoin/liquid blockchain data and it uses Boltz to do non-custodial submarine swaps to send and receive payments. All fees are currently passed on to the Liquid Network, Bitcoin miners or Boltz.

If and when StashPay charges money, it will be by providing additional services that provide value to users. These backend services may be built as closed source software. But the client app will remain fully open source and usable without these optional services. This will prevent StashPay from rent seeking in terms of the user’s money and their data.

But regardless of if StashPay becomes a business or remains a passion project, something has become clear to me. I’m building StashPay primarily for myself because I enjoy making stuff I want to use. A wallet is really a labour of love. An expression of something you build because you believe it needs to exist. Open sourcing it only feels like the next logical step in that journey.

Open Source Repository

The GitHub repo for StashPay can be found here. Make sure to also switch your source to this link if you’re using Obtainium to get APK updates on Android:

https://github.com/onionmill/stashpay

Removing single points of failure throughout the stack

The last few months have also helped to clarify further steps needed to improve user agency throughout the StashPay stack. Specifically, I’ve outlined ways to improve privacy and remove dependency on any single party within the Breez Liquid SDK. You can read about that here:

https://github.com/breez/breez-sdk-liquid/issues/554

These changes should lay the groundwork to reduce any single point of failure and give users a greater level of agency. Ultimately the goal is to allow StashPay users to configure the electrum servers that their device fetches blockchain data from and also the Boltz submarine swap server that their wallet does bitcoin and lightning payments through. Of course most users will never need to know about any of these details because StashPay will come preconfigured with default settings. But simply having the option can be powerful if and when it’s needed. I will share more on timelines for these improvements over the coming months as dependencies line up.

So in case there is any single entity that fails… be it Boltz, Breez or StashPay. Developers and users will be empowered to reconfigure the app based on their own needs. At a high level this is what Bitcoin has always meant to me. To take responsibility and empower the user to take control of their money and data.

Why release the Android App as an APK?

After watching other wallets get pulled from the Google Play Store, relying solely on Google turned into a real risk to consider in the product’s threat model. Do I really want to risk not being able to release security updates to users if a Google employee randomly decides to pull StashPay from Google Play?

And more importantly, how did we even get here? Why do I need to ask some faceless corporation permission to release an app to my users? As an indie hacker I’m not building for scale. I want to create a high quality relationship with my customers. No data hungry corporations in between. So I’ve decided to release an APK directly via the open web.

While I also plan to release StashPay on Google Play, the APK will always remain an option to download directly from the web.

Beta Warning

As with the iOS TestFlight please be careful to only use StashPay for Android with funds you are willing to lose while the app is still in Beta.

How to Download the Android App

Option 1 (easiest): via the StashPay website

The easiest way to install StashPay is to download the APK here: https://stashpay.me

Option 2 (recommended): via Obtainium

Follow the instructions here to get app updates via Obtainium: https://github.com/onionmill/stashpay

🤖🧡⚡️

I’m really excited to begin this journey with you! The first wave of testers have been invited to TestFlight. I will roll out invites to everyone who signed up over the coming days. And in case you haven’t you can still sign up here:

Features in this Release

This release is limited in scope by design. StashPay is the first wallet to ship using the brand new Breez Liquid SDK. So I want to make sure I to get a chance to iron out bugs and focus on quality. You can test the following features in this release:

1. Receive to Lightning invoice (BOLT11)

2. Send to Lightning invoice (BOLT11)

3. Recovery Phrase backup & restore

Once the quality for the basics is rock solid I will roll out more features. Please let me know if you run into any bugs and provide logs to help us debug.

Beta Warning

This is beta software. Please only test with funds you are willing to lose.

Feedback Welcome!

Please send feedback using the “Send Beta Feedback” in TestFlight. You can share screenshots here and I can follow up via email:

Future Roadmap

The primary goal of StashPay is to create a great product for freelancers to receive payment in Bitcoin. So the following items are up next: 

1. Send to LNURL / Lightning address

2. Receive to LNURL / Lightning address

3. Zaprite integration

4. Send to on-chain address

5. Receive to on-chain address

I’m open to shifting priorities around based on user feedback. I’ll prioritize features that get requested the most.

A Note on Android

A few of you have asked about Android… I have a working version of StashPay for Android running on my old Pixel 3A. And I’ll get that into beta testing as soon as possible. But I want to make sure the product quality is there on iOS before releasing Android too quickly. So bear with me for a bit.

Sign up for TestFlight

If you would like to be added in the next wave of TestFlight invites just sign up here:

LFG 🌍⚡️🧡

Today I’m excited to share a new project that I’ve been working on. A Bitcoin wallet made specifically for freelancers and digital nomads.

Here’s the TL;DR:

🌎 Get paid in Bitcoin, anywhere

🤑 Low fees: 0,25% + 40 sats to receive

⚡️ Built on Lightning & Liquid

🧡 Your keys, your coins

🧾 1st class Invoicing & Accounting

What Problem does StashPay solve?

After running my coaching business almost entirely in bitcoin for the last two years, I’ve learned a lot about what a small business needs to run on bitcoin and the gaps of the current solutions. I went through the pain of running on bitcoin intentionally. My working hypothesis is that medium-of-exchange adoption will start picking up when small businesses start demanding payment in bitcoin. While accepting bitcoin has been positive for my business financially, the user experience has not. Fees were high, privacy was bad, and invoicing/accounting needed several manual steps. So I’ve decided to build a product specifically for the freelancer/solopreneur that wants to receive payment in bitcoin with low fees and without needing to sign up for a custodial service.

Who am I?

I’ve worked in startups for 12 years and led the development of one of the first self-custody Lightning Wallets at Lightning Labs in 2018/2019. I’ve seen wallets come and go, including the one we built. So I know how hard it is to find a business case. But I feel now is the right time in terms of technology and adoption to make a bet on bitcoin payments.

I’m doing this because I enjoy the autonomy of building a bootstrapped product that scratches my own itch. I value owning my time and love the creative process. So I decided to build in true indie hacker ethos: learning out in the open, self-funded and bootstrapped. This means I can focus on customers and build for the longterm. My intention is to build product iterations quickly and ship early to get customer feedback often. The first release is limited in scope by design. I’m not making any assumption on what customers want. I will listen and learn.

Building the Proof-of-Concept

As a first step I’ve built a proof-of-concept wallet using the new Breez Liquid SDK. They refer to it as  a “nodeless Lightning integration” that offers developers an alternative to a custodial Lightning service. More details below. Here are my impressions so far.

Initial thoughts on the Liquid SDK:

Fees

The fees are quite low. It’s 0.25% plus 40 sats to receive a Lightning payment and 0.1% plus 40 sats to send. This is considerably cheaper than LSP based Lightning wallets. Phoenix is one of my favorite options for a self-custody Lightning wallet (shout out to the ACINQ team, they are absolutely killing it). Phoenix currently charges ~1% plus an on-chain fee for every payment I receive (either to open a new channel or to splice into an existing channel to add receive capacity). The problem with this approach is that it’s cheaper for my business to have clients pay me on-chain for monthly invoices. In high fee environments this can be expensive! I’ve had a client not wanting to pay their invoice while fees were around 100 dollars after the halving. Instead they asked to be able to pay in Lightning. So I’ve been looking for a solution to improve my client UX ever since. While accepting Lightning reduces the fees on my client’s side, it just moves the burden of paying the on-chain fee to my side, effectively making my business a speculator on the on-chain fee market 😕 Using Liquid swaps saves my business 0,75% (of the payment volume!) in Lightning fees plus any main-chain fees per received payment. If we assume, for example, a monthly revenue of 10k USD this saves me north of 75 USD per month just in Lightning fees to receive payments. And this doesn’t yet take into account the fees I would have to pay later to send.

Liquid Trust Model

In contrast to Bitcoin main-chain the Liquid sidechain is not trustless but rather requires trusting the entities running the Liquid Network. And unlike in the Lightning Network unilateral exit is not possible, which is why many argue Liquid is not a Layer 2. I personally agree with this definition. But as a business owner I’m totally fine with this trust model for payments, even for larger monthly freelancer invoices. The Breez SDK uses Boltz.exchange for trustless Lightning swaps and payment amounts can range between 1000 sats (~0.50 USD) and 0.25 BTC (~15k USD). This meets my current needs for invoicing. When a certain threshold of value in the wallet is reached and I want a higher level of security, I can always swap out to a main-chain multi-sig wallet for 0.1% plus the lockup/claim transaction fees (see SDK docs). But until I do, I don’t have to worry about the main-chain fee market at all and can run my business payments with low fees.

Privacy

Liquid SDK privacy is not as good as the Fedimint protocol. Boltz sees all Lightning transaction amounts and payment recipients. But so would an LSP, for example the ACINQ node in the case of Phoenix. This gives my business similar privacy to using a self-custody Lightning wallet. The clients paying me get the sender privacy of Lightning. Receiver privacy for my business will hopefully improve with BOLT12 adoption. But in the meantime this is good enough for my threat model and certainly better than the on-chain solution I currently use. This protects me and my clients from seeing each others’ UTXOs. And my invoicing/accounting service does not see my UTXOs (on-chain addresses are stored with monthly invoices).

The alternative is a custodial service

The other option to receive freelance payments via Lightning would be to use a custodial service. This would link all of my personal data and payment data in a single company’s database. Waiting to sold, hacked or leaked in some other way. The fees would also be higher than using Liquid swaps. Custodial services on the market currently charge around 1% in fees, so about 4 times as expensive as using Liquid swaps. And I would prefer to keep personal data to myself and trust the Liquid Network instead of trusting a single custodian.

Developer UX

The developer complexity of building with the Liquid SDK is also considerably lower than building an LSP based self-custody wallet. There is no channel management, no inbound liquidity, no channel-state to backup and no gossip sync to worry about. Breez does all the heavy lifting wrt Boltz swaps integration. It’s written in Rust and has bindings for React Native. This means I can build a Lightning wallet as a single developer and only have to worry about product. This is huge!

Next challenge: offline receive

Offline receive and lightning-address support is still under development in the Liquid SDK. Though this is scheduled to be released soon. I’m excited to test this, as it will be a crucial component to enable the UX I need. The SDK uses the same mobile notification solution that other Lightning wallets use. The mobile app is woken up via a push notification to release the preimage for the Lightning invoice in order to settle a payment trustlessly.

A big thank you…

I want say Kudos to the Breez and Boltz teams for creating such an amazing developer UX! I’ve known Roy since the original Breez wallet was built on the LND mobile library we developed at Lightning Labs in 2019. They’ve been building relentlessly in the meantime and I know how hard it is to make a Lightning business model work. It definitely feels great to work with them again. Their support and service has been second to none.

Invoicing & Accounting integration

StashPay is a freelancer first wallet. So tight integration with existing invoicing and accounting software is key. I want to take a moment here to give a shout out to John and the team at Zaprite. It’s one of my favorite Bitcoin products and I’ve been a customer since I was able to pay for it. I’ve been in touch with John from the beginning of building StashPay to figure out how to best integrate with Zaprite’s amazing invoicing and accounting. And I hope this product brings a lot of value to their customers as well.

Onwards⚡️

Join the TestFlight release for iOS