Open source is an essential piece of Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Our Bitcoin-focused team loves open-source, and we want to give back to the open-source realm. So, every other Friday, the Voltage crew spends the day working on whatever open-source projects they choose, as Voltage CEO Graham explained in an earlier blog post.
It’s been a while since we wrote up a FossFriday summary. But we’ve still been doing it every two weeks.
Without further ado, here are the projects the Voltage team worked on the last week of January.
Frontend engineer Brandon worked on an app for his micropayment webinar. He decided to create a website to demo different ways of making different types of lightning payments. On 1/27, he was in the process of making a demo for LSATs, where a Lightning payment can be used as authentication to access a certain resource. Since LSATs use macaroons, “caveats” can be added to them with other rules. So for example, a user can pay for an LSAT that’s only valid for a certain amount of time: one day, for example.
UX/UI engineer Stephen merged another PR for bitcoinqr.dev to add another wallet CoinJar to the website. He also worked on the whentaproot, a website that encourages companies and wallets to support Taproot addresses. Taproot was a privacy and security upgrade to Bitcoin that was finalized in 2021, but most companies still need to support the new type of address.
Backend engineer Alex has been working on Nostr, a protocol that’s been getting a bunch of attention in the bitcoin universe recently because it can be used for decentralized social media, such as a version of Twitter where one company isn’t in control and can’t censor content. Since many people have been uploading pictures to Nostr using the service nostr.build, Alex decided to work on a self-hosted version of such a website for people to use.
Research engineer Paul has been working on a new aesthetic for the phone app for Mutiny, a privacy-minded Bitcoin/Lightning wallet that’s in the works. He’s been working on mobile app “sheets” for certain views in the apps, such as when sending or receiving a payment – so the window can be resized smoothly.
Platform engineer Sam continued with his work on Lnbits, a lightning wallet and account system, with a range of cool extensions. Sam’s first Lnbits PR was merged in last month! Since then, he’s been working on improving documentation of the usermanager swagger file? Added docs for response bodies from the API, since many of those bodies are empty.
Research engineer Tony spent some time fixing bugs for Mutiny, described above. He’s in the process of making Voltage’s upcoming LSP compatible with Mutiny. He upgraded the programming language Rust to a newer version which led to some problems that needed fixing. He also needed to work around incompatibilities between CLN and LDK in certain scenarios. For instance, they calculate channel reserves differently for channels with under 100 satoshi channels. Put some testnet bitcoin on my node which took some time.
