Over the last few months, we've been preparing our wallet for Fedimint integrations. Today marks the first release with Fedimint support ready for alpha testing!
Fedimint is software for managing federated custodian funds. It's similar to the trust model of Liquid but better privacy and without a blockchain involved. It also has first-class support for Lightning.
The way we've gone about the integration is to seamlessly smooth over the edges that exist in self-custodial Lightning. Our hybrid approach will use a configured Federation when needed. Otherwise, it uses self-custodial Lightning if it exists for the user. This helps things like channel reserves, channel minimums, high chain fees to get started, etc.
You may add a Federation alongside your existing wallet or start with one without needing to open channels or pay on-chain costs. We recommend keeping the value low since this is a very early release, and there are some known features that we still need to develop.
It should feel and act like the same Mutiny Wallet with some caveats around backups for now.
A massive shoutout to the Fedimint team for their recent v0.2 release. It's still early for them and us, so all testing and feedback is welcomed! This does rely on having a federation invite code. We suspect that, over the next few weeks and months, more mainnet federations will pop up. There is not a default one built into the wallet.
We should also have Lightning Address support in a few weeks that works through federations. Kody has already started that work, and it seems promising: https://github.com/Kodylow/hermes
Also, there's beginning work on supporting the Lightning Service Provider Specification, which will eventually allow more plug-and-play support for any LSP to power Mutiny. This will be huge for more advanced node runners as the spec matures. Huge shoutout to John Cantrell for that work.
A lot of core infrastructure has been built into this release. Let us know if there are any problems; it should be identical to previous versions if you do not configure a Fedimint or different LSP.
Expect much more to come soon. Happy new year!