Zeus
BETA TESTING
Zeus. Currently I'm running 0.8.2 in testflight (iOS), and as a previous Blixt user (sorry Hampus), I LOVE IT! I've had very few, almost no, failed payments. And @evankaloudis has even helped me personally (fangirl moment) in my DMs.
Here's the announcement for their stable 0.8.1 version.
This release features a new standalone Point of Sale, support for importing Nostr contacts, persistent LND for Android users, and more.
REVIEW
There are so many small touches that make using Zeus superior to anything else out there. Little animations, the ability to choose your channel partners, the @zeuspay.com LNURL (mine is "expatriotic@zeuspay.com", Evan's is "evan@zeuspay.com"), the extra steps taken to make privacy a default, and how infrequent payment failures occur. It's even what I use to sign into SN. Even waiting for the node to load is pleasurable due to the insanely cool graphics. And when you pay a lightning strikes. Even connecting to a node there's a really cool ring of electricity. I love how even waiting for something to happen is Zeus isn't painful because the animations are so creative and aesthetic.
Loading into the app animation
Animation when payment is complete
NODES AND CHANNEL MANAGEMENT
In using Zeus I sent UTXOs to the wallet which I then used to open some channels. Now, this is where things got tricky, at first I had some small channels, I had redundant channels. E.g., one small Olympus channel that got opened when I sent some LN sats to Zeus and was awarded some inbound liquidity. I later opened a larger taproot channel with them and closed the incredibly small channel that I initially made. I went on to open channels to NERV (Kevin Cai's node) & Blixt Wallet, but Blixt was never chosen for outgoing payments as it has worse channel management than NERV. I then opened some 1 mil channels to ACINQ & deezy.io, and tried to open a bigger 3 mil channel to Voltage FLOW 2.0 but that was a disappointment because it never went live for some reason, always saying it was offline.
I was debating what other nodes to connect to, WoS, Boltz, Kraken etc, but decided that instead of having lots of 1 mil channels, I'd rather have 3 channels of the following sizes: 1 mil, 5 mil, 10 mil. I reasoned that this would mean less individual points of failure, and for most payments, one of the channels would be sufficient without needing to pull from >1 channel (unless it's a rather big purchase). This was all inspired by @DarthCoin who made me realize that rather than using coinjoin and trying to buy things using onchain transactions, I should be making better use of the LN. Zeus isn't my only LN wallet of course, I have sats with Phoenix (splicing is AMAZING) and Alby.
TIPS
- Use the following to find good nodes: a. Amboss b. Mempool
- Scan their QR and make sure to NOT choose a TOR node.
- You can select one UTXO to open a channel or combine UTXOs to make a larger channel (Using single UTXOs when possible is better for privacy, but you don't want a lot of small channels)
- Toggle on taproot and see if it works, if it doesn't, no worries, toggle off and proceed (Opening channels with taproot confers a privacy bonus)
- Using on Android let's you keep your phone node running persistently, iOS doesn't have this ability
PRIVACY
Here's how Zeus stacks up: source
BACKGROUND
I'd always wanted to use Zeus by dev @evankaloudis, but never ran a lightning node. As a consumer of copious amounts of podcasts, I especially loved the ones that Evan was on. I admired his story. He seemed intrepid. He was a fellow self-sovereign individual as I sought to be. He eschewed lesser versions of lightning that made compromises and blazed his own path. Here's his Stacker News AMA.
meme credit @DarthCoin
How did you choose nodes for your Zeus embedded node?