The Breez SDK Is Fit for the Gods of Elysium

I don’t imagine gods need to compromise much. Mímir knows secrets and remembers everything, so he probably doesn’t have much use for the friction of 2FA. Zeus and Hades aren’t going to spend any time opening up an issue on GitHub when their wallets aren’t syncing properly. Either it works, or they smite the devs.

Elysium is where the gods reside, and it’s also the name of our latest SDK partner. Their goal — fittingly — is to further optimize their users’ bitcoin experience without compromising on custody or security.

The Elysium team is keenly focused on optimizing UX, and the thing about people focused on the UX is that they expect others to do the same. Perhaps that’s why they’ve chosen the Breez SDK: because it offers the best combination of functionality, ease, support, liquidity, and transparency. No compromises. As in Elysium, so on Earth.

Gianmarco first got into bitcoin back in 2016, and like many of us, he loved the idea of bitcoin but did not love the unwieldy, highly technical UX. While looking for help on Telegram (we’ve all been there), he met Aron, who was also seeking solutions. Like dynamic, young entrepreneurs, they recognized that they had a problem, the problem was probably widespread, and solving it would add value to people’s lives and to bitcoin as a form of money.

The two of them set out to build tech for normies that preserves all of bitcoin’s virtues without its UX vices. In the beginning was Elysium.

Elysium’s simplifying mission starts literally at the beginning — with the seed phrase. And it simplifies the seed phrase by eliminating it. Instead, the wallet can use any number of other data points — voices, faces, fingerprints, the user’s favorite Jimi Hendrix guitar solo — hash them, and tie them cryptographically to the seed phrase, which the user never sees. The user gets arbitrary degrees of entropy over multi-factor authentication without having to remember anything, and they can spend and get paid in bitcoin, just like any other self-custodial wallet.

Elysium is flattening the onramp to the bitcoin economy right from the first step any incoming user will take. And the Breez SDK has flattened Elysium’s onramp onto Lightning.

Elysium Lab: You can download their app via the App Store or Google Play

The Elysium team praised the Breez SDK so highly that we should probably add some kind of disclaimer to the effect that we have no interest in their business and didn’t blackmail them. But we obviously do have an interest in their business. Like all our partners, we want Elysium to succeed, and we work hard to help them. Just bear in mind that this section contains verbatim quotes, and no, we aren’t holding their cats hostage.

Here are some points they highlighted:

It just sounds like a paid plug when a design partner says something like “It’s the best tool out there. It’s really as simple as that. I’ve been working in Lightning for the last five years, and I haven’t found any SDK that’s as easy to implement. A lot of things are still technical today, but the way Breez implements the service is simply amazing to me. And it’s still self-custodial!” Geez, guys. Thanks.

When you ask someone how hard it was to integrate Breez and whether they’d recommend it to other developers, you don’t expect this: “It was a day or two, maybe a week until we had coded everything […] I will suggest Breez because it’s the best option out there; the whole thing is that it’s an end-to-end SDK. Some SDKs don’t manage the liquidity properly or throw unexpected errors. If you’re a wallet, and you want to integrate straight away, it’s the best solution. The support with Breez is amazing, and the ease of integration is exactly what founders need to validate their ideas as fast as possible, like within days.” Okay. Enough. I’m blushing.

But they keep going about our support: “Close contact with the Breez team ensures that no insurmountable problem will arise. I don’t know how your team responds within an hour in whatever time zone.” This is starting to get a little awkward, like when a crowd of people is singing Happy Birthday to you. What do I do with my hands?

Just two more quotes about topics that are important to virtually all devs. Let’s start with liquidity through the Breez open-LSP model: “It’s managed perfectly with an LSP and all the different providers.” Yeah! Go LSP partners!

And then, of course, the importance of the Breez SDK being FOSS: “I would never integrate an SDK that is not open source because it violates the ethos of bitcoin, and I wouldn’t know what they’re doing with the data. FOSS shows the confidence Breez has in its own product.”

But confidence without evidence would be hollow. Just empty boasting. Propaganda. Feedback like this is our evidence. It’s what gives us confidence that our careful design work, fastidious coding, and neurotic testing has paid off. You never really know how good your product is until you release it and get feedback from the people using it, and the Breez SDK is working really well. We’re confident because you’ve been telling us that we’re right to be.

Elysium the company shares many features with its divine namesake. One notable difference, though, is that the company is real. Aron, Gianmarco, and a dozen teammates in Lugano have built the company, the technology, and the app. They’ve turned the fantasy into reality by working together.

When it came to adding Lightning to their app, they turned to Breez, and we cooperated with them to push their vision a little farther into reality. And it seems to have worked really well. At least our partners at Elysium seem as happy as an Olympian with a bowl of oven-fresh ambrosia.

We’d love to cooperate with you too. If you’re thinking of adding bitcoin payments to your app, but you want to play on god mode, get in touch.