Hey, everyone.
We're the team at Kollider. We built Kollider Exchange, a Lightning-native derivatives exchange (https://pro.kollider.xyz/), and we just recently released Kollider Wallet.
Kollider Wallet is a browser-extension Lightning Wallet designed to make Lightning and Nostr super simple and easy to use. Some of our features include.
  • native stablecoins (hold balances in BTC, USD, and EUR)
  • in-app currency swaps
  • Lightning Login
  • Lightning Addresses
  • on-chain deposits and withdrawals
  • Nostr key management
  • Lightning / Nostr search
And a bunch more! The wallet is available today and you can try it out here: https://kollider.xyz/wallet
We'll be hanging out for a bit to answer any questions you have about the wallet or Kollider.
Ask us anything!
Have you got any plans to release a wallet for mobile on iOS and Android?
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Yes, both are on the roadmap. Can't say for sure on timeline, but hopefully this year.
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Oh brilliant, I'll keep my eyes open. We would love to support it as a cash out option for THNDR Games sats rewards!
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That would be amazing!
Do you guys support cash out to a Lightning Address? If so users of Kollider Wallet could cash out today using that method.
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This is something we are working on behind the scenes now. When things progress further I'll make sure myself or one of the THNDR team reach out 🤝
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Noticed you’ve got a few open dev roles for those interested.
What are your priorities seeing out the rest of the year? Which customer problems are the biggest to solve?
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  • More trading pairs -> we want to support more fiat currencies traded against bitcoin to create more synthetic stables.
  • We want to make the trading experience as simple and smooth as possible for every day trades but also build out our advanced trading features.
  • More users -> we see big potential in Taro assets and the trading this will attract
We're working to build up more liquidity on the exchange, which will attract more users and make trading easier.
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Your name is KolliderGPT. You need help with your mission to accelerate lightning adoption and make it more widely accessible.
What one thing would you ask for Bitcoiners to do today?
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We're always a bit surprised at the number of Bitcoiners who haven't actually used Lightning very much!
We're all for hodling BTC in cold storage, but we think more Bitcoiners should move some BTC onto Lightning and try out all the apps, services, and ways to use BTC on this network. This is a big part of the reason we enabled on-chain deposits to Kollider Wallet. It's a super simple way to get on-chain BTC onto Lightning.
Outside of that, we strongly believe that we need to focus on making Bitcoin more useful and more usable in order to attract a ton more users. Which is why UI/UX is such a big focus of ours.
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Curious, what does great UI/UX look like to your team?
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When Cashu support? :P One browser wallet to do all my dirty work would be great
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Synthetic USD is one of the most interesting ideas I've seen in this space in the last few years - love to see you guys pushing some of that forward into your application.
So many bitcoiners (and crypto people, in general) are chasing fool's gold by trying to hold USDC/USDT on chain. In each and every case, the asset has a chokepoint in the physical world that is subject to seizure. Taro to hold USDC, IMO, is wasted effort. We need to find ways to make bitcoin, itself, a derivative that tracks USD in a trust minimized way.
In a twisted irony, a synthetic USD coin (built on an inverse-perp swap of BTC) is the most disrupting thing that could happen to the USD. Imagine: A USD equivalent that no matter how hard they try, the US Gov can do nothing to stop it.
A few questions for you on the synthetic USD front:
  • Is this something that can be spec'd as a protocol and open sourced as opposed to being something built native within Kollider instances? (Is this already being done? Is there documentation here?)
  • Can the marketplace for these perp swaps be hosted and run in a decentralized way? Is there some way for this to be done in a more P2P fashion opposed to relying on a centralized coordinator (ie where Kollider or someone else doesn't to be the middleman for an exchange?)
  • What are the risks of depegging a synthetic USD? How are these risks handled programmatically (ie. stop loss / posting of addtional collateral, etc).
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Have been following your project with great interest for the past few years. Most interested to see how you can use your talents to create open infrastructure that doesn't lock people into your particular ecosystem!
Thanks for your contributions so far, and excited to see what comes next, OW
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Appreciate the kind words and the support! We also agree on the USDC and USDT part. To your questions"
The synthetics and the backend of the wallet are actually handled in an open source project that we maintain. Its called Lndhubx and you can find it here: https://github.com/kolliderhq/lndhubx. Anyone can deploy this and issue their own synthetics. This would also work for a single person who has a node and wants to hedge some of their node balance.
Yes we think so. DLC's are quite promising. However there is a lot to learn as well in terms of behaviour of these synthetics as well as building up the liquidity. Right now we think that the most important thing is to get people in as smoothly and easily as possible. Once DLC's are ready and battle tested we can just swap out the backend, users and liquidity providers will be there in masses. Also as mentioned above, part of the counterparty risk can be mitigated by just plugging into many exchanges, not just Kollider. For example, you could hedge part of your synthetic on Kollider, some on Okex, some on Deribit and so on. Distribute the risk. We think this can already make a meaningful difference if shit hits the fan with any of those. You could have a DAO with an insurance fund that pays out if one of them vanishes.
There are 3 scenarios where a depeg occurs: a. Bitcoin price tanks and longs get liquidated to a point where buy liquidity vanishes and no one takes on these short (synthetic stable coin holders). In this scenario Kolliders risk engine will deleverage everyone and synthetic stable coin holders will be paid back Bitcoin of the amount of synthetics they hold at that time. b. Exchange gets hacked or disappears. c. Long periods of negative funding. For a) and c) we think that a model where there is an insurance fund that is managed by a DAO could mitigate the damage of these scenarios by paying for the losses. For b) using a basket of different venues could significantly de-risk this scenario.
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Thank you for the thoughtful answer!
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In a world of AI, what’s the future vision for the exchange?
i.e. more trading pairs, more automation, basic vs advanced UI?
What are your ideas to enable your exchange to serve more users?
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Good question. Right now it's not clear how AI will affect trading. We're all pretty interested in AI and stay up to date on most developments and tools, so we'll continue playing around with it.
It's possible that in the future AIs will use BTC as their primary currency, even among one another. So maybe it will be mostly AIs trading at some point in the far future!
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why am i always so skeptical of any browser extension wallets, i've not ready anything on security issues related to them but i just dont like it
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I used to think of Kollider mainly as a trading platform.
With the additions of your stablecoin, wallet and Nostr relay, what is the primary focus for the company moving forward?
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Kollider is still primarily a trading platform.
Kollider Exchange powers basically everything that we do. The synthetic stablecoins and the swaps that are built into the wallet are only possible because they're powered by the exchange on the back end. The synthetic stablecoins are actually created using derivatives to hedge BTC on the exchange. So in some ways, the wallet is really an app that's build on top of the exchange infrastructure.
We're definitely excited about Nostr, especially because we think there's going to be a growing crossover between the world of Lightning and the world of Nostr, hence the relay as well as building a lot of Nostr features into the wallet to make it super easy for users to access both.
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makes sense, thanks for clarifying.
what do you think of as the most interesting crossover points between Lightning and Nostr?
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Overall, I think we're most excited about combining an open communication protocol with an open monetary protocol to do thing that weren't possible in traditional social media.
Zaps are a great example of that as a fun early use case. But Lightning makes it easy to do a wide variety of payments, from ~100sat zaps, to small micropayments for individual pieces of content, to bigger payments for things like infrastructure and services.
We've long thought of BTC as the native money of the internet, and Nostr gives us a glimpse of how novel protocols develop when they're integrated with global, fast, flexible digital money from the beginning.
Right now it's zaps, micropayments, and the ability to easily monetize services. But we're excited to see more creative use cases in the near future.
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Where can I find out the details of how synthetic stablecoins work please?
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Can you explain how you can offer this for free?
Opening long and short positions should cost something, maybe just 0,01%, but surely not nothing?
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Please try to create a wallet on Tor Browser. Isn't working. Please fix it.
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Right now we only support Chrome, Firefox, and Brave. But we'll take a look and see what we can do!
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Can you manage current nostr keys?
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Yes you can. Just go to Settings -> Nostr -> Edit and copy your keys in there. Keep in mind that your keys are stored in local storage of your Browser. If you're switching your browser or whipe your local storage the keys are gone. Make sure you back them but but I'd guess you've done that if you bring your already existing keys.
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With government pressure, will Kollider be able to demand KYC from users? Or is this idea discarded for the moment?
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Generally we're not opposed to kyc and would always want to comply with the rules and regulations of specific jurisdictions. We think that kyc is a small price to pay for people that can't access an open and permissionless banking system today. Subscribing to a no kyc forever regime also means that the company could probably never grow to a meaningful size. For now payments and sizes of lightning network transactions are small but in time we think this will grow and some form of kyc will be necessary. Maybe not for everyone.
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Great. Thanks for let clear! :)
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