Summary of Lightning Network news for the 4th week of 2026 (January 19th 2026 to January 25th 2026).
Hey there, welcome to your weekly recap of the latest Lightning developments.
The Bittr App Is HereThe Bittr App Is Here
Bittr released their new app (iOS TestFlight only for now). Bittr is an OG Swiss dollar-cost-averaging (DCA) service where users can setup and forget recurring Bitcoin buy orders that are delivered straight to their self-custodial wallet. Up until now, Bittr worked with a "bring your own wallet" model, meaning users had to already have a Bitcoin wallet and communicate Bittr an address from this wallet when setting up the recurring buy order the first time[1]. With the Bittr app, this last remaining friction point is on the way out. The app embarks a self-custodial on-chain and Lightning wallet, leveraging both the BDK and LDK. On the user's first buy, a Lightning channel is opened[2] between Bittr and the node running inside the app, sufficiently large to process this payment and many future ones. From then on, recurring buys will be sent straight through the channel until it's full. Larger payments will be sent immediately on-chain.
At first glance, DCA-ing into a Lightning channel may sound a bit peculiar to users who view Bitcoin more as long term savings rather than money to spend regularly[3]. Yet, Lightning is actually a very good fit for DCA as it simplifies UTXO management. Let's say a user wants to buy 50 euros worth of Bitcoin every week, without holding them on a custodial exchange. Usually, that would mean creating a new small UTXO every week, and hence increased block space usage and fees, notably when moving them in the future. With Lightning, one big shared UTXO is created in the beginning, and as buy orders are executed more and more of this UTXO belongs to the user. When all the funds are on the user's side, the channel is closed and the user ends up with one big UTXO instead of multiple smaller ones, without any manipulation on their hand or really having to think about it. There are, of course, tradeoffs: the exchange has to allocate capital to the channel beforehand, incurring an opportunity cost ; and while the channel is open the funds in it are held on a hot wallet rather than a colder storage solution.
It's very cool to see another DCA solution take a leap with Lightning, after Relai gave it a try but ultimately discontinued it due to low demand. I remain convinced that Lightning's trustless UTXO-sharing capabilities are still undervalued in the spot exchange space, and if one company can succeed at it, I think Bittr is well-positioned to be the one.
Lightning Symmetry UpdateLightning Symmetry Update
Gregory Sanders updated their Lightning Symmetry proof-of-concept to include some of the latest developments of Bitcoin's transaction relay (e.g. ephemeral anchors), cooperative close support, increased test coverage and more.
Electrum ReleaseElectrum Release
Electrum v4.7.0 brings 2 new Lightning-related features:
- "submarine payments", which is the ability to pay an on-chain address from the Lightning balance using submarine swaps. Interestingly, Electrum's swap implementation is more flexible than many in that it enables any person running Electrum to be a swap provider[4], and users to choose among this multiple providers, using Nostr for discovery;
- LNURL-Withdraw support, enabling user to claim "Lightning vouchers" (such as Azteco vouchers for example).
Moneybadger Support In Zeus?Moneybadger Support In Zeus?
Following Blink, Zeus added native support for scanning MoneyBadger payment QR codes (called CryptoQRs). MoneyBadger is an impressive Lightning payments success story[5], with now literally hundreds of thousands of stores supported across South Africa. A key to this success is how they retrofitted Bitcoin/Lightning payments into existing payment providers infrastructure in South Africa, where QR Code based payments were already quite mainstream. MoneyBadger integrated with the solutions of various vendors, linking their payment rails to the Lightning Network. Typically, the payment flow at the point of sale would be:
- when prompted to choose, the customer selects "QR Code" as the payment option ;
- a proprietary QR Code displays on the terminal (different QR depending on the vendor/store) ;
- the customers opens MoneyBadger's app and scans the QR Code ;
- behind the scenes, MoneyBadger converts this proprietary QR Code into a Lightning invoice and prompts the customer to open the invoice in their favorite Lightning wallet ;
- the customer opens the invoice in their wallet, clicks pay, and MoneyBadger handles the rest (i.e. routing the payment to the right store).
Now that more and more wallets support directly scanning the proprietary QR codes of MoneyBadger's partners, users can just pop out their wallet (Blink, Zeus, Aqua, etc.) and pay directly, just as if they were scanning a regular Lightning invoice. Behind the scenes, the wallet fetches the invoice from MoneyBadger's servers with a Lightning Address based mechanism. First, the wallet recognizes that the QR Code is from a MoneyBadger partner through simple pattern matching, and convert it to a @cryptoqr.net Lightning Address. For example, a QR Code reading http://example.com/za.co.electrum.picknpay/confirm123 would be translated into the Lightning Address http://example.com/za.co.electrum.picknpay/confirm123@cryptoqr.net, and MoneyBadger's servers would then return the appropriate invoice when this address is called. Leveraging Lightning Address in this way makes MoneyBadger/CryptoQR integration into Lightning wallets easier, since all that is required is basic pattern matching at the QR code scan level, and the rest is just a regular Lightning Address request. Pretty smart.
I personally find MoneyBadger's approach of integrating into existing systems (aided by an already established QR payments culture) very powerful. Of course, it has the drawback of centralizing payments around a central actor for QR code translation, but I see it as a pragmatic step to bringing vast payment processor networks into Lightning.
That's it for today! As always, feel free to drop any feedback in the comments. Thank you very much for reading this far, and until next week!
At some point in the past Bittr supported xpubs and derived a new address for each buy, but this features has been discontinued, I suspect for regulatory reasons (Bittr asks you to sign a message with the key corresponding to the address to demonstrates that you control the wallet). ↩
Incurring a one time cost to cover channel operations (open & close), right now 10,000 sats. ↩
For those already living under a Bitcoin standard and spending regularly, this feature let's them easily and automatically refill a spending wallet. ↩
Of course, swap providers are expected to be available 24/7, so you'd typically run Electrum with the swap server enabled in an always-on setup. This can be a VPS, but interestingly the swap server doesn't need any port to be opened, so it can very well run on an always-home computer in a home network. ↩
Which we first covered back in November 2022. ↩