Whether you are a new Bitcoiner, or with more or less experience, for sure you have heard or used MUUN wallet at some point. Today I'm going to tell you my experience with that wallet and why I stopped using it.
Some time ago, in a galaxy far far away ...... Ah, no, sorry, that's another topic...
Some time ago, and following the practice of searching and doing my own research, looking on Youtube for the best Bitcoin wallets, I found that many Youtubers were recommending MUUN wallet as "the perfect solution" for Bitcoiners. So I decided to install it and try it out.
The first thing that shocks me is their way of recovering the key seeds, it is not the traditional way, sure you know that it is recovered with 8 combinations of random letters and numbers + a pdf that they provide you, which seemed to me, I do not know, very strange, I was very suspicious about that, because if they tell me that they are self-custody and on the other hand they give me a pdf + email recovery, it sounds not credible, right?
I was a bit suspicious about that way of giving us our self custody, but I decided to give them a vote of confidence and start using it (always with small amounts of sats of course).
After 2 months of use apparently everything was going great when in this same year (2023) the news of the ordinals spread in the Bitcoin network. That's when the nightmare began!
When trying to send X amount of sats using the Lightning network (LN) as the service had completely collapsed! Unbelievable as it shouldn't (supposedly) affect the high fees on the main Bitcoin blockchain to LN transactions.
I took it upon myself to investigate further and the discovery is completely unheard of. In short: MUUN uses "submarine swaps" for their LN transactions, this means they are not purely LN, they rely on the mainnet to be able to move sats on LN.
With Onchain transactions it was worse all around. MUUN is supposed to do the conversions from the LN network to Onchain and vice versa, and of course charge its fee for its use, but it should not be as high as the amount it wanted to charge in those days when the Bitcoiner world was in turmoil when transaction fees were over 200 sat/vB.
The agony lasted several days with the service down or under maintenance, luckily I was just testing and didn't have many assets there.
That is my bitter experience with MUUN and why I decided not to use it or recommend it to anyone.
I hope my talk was helpful and encourages you to do your own research every time.
Let me know in the comments which Bitcoin and LN wallets you use and your experiences with them, I'll read you and we'll learn together!
#bitcoin #wallets