Breez has released a new app, Misty Breez, the simplest self-custodial app for bitcoin payments.

Read more about it on Bitcoin Magazine: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/breez-announces-launch-of-new-wallet-misty-breez

Carl Benz was a great engineer, and the car he invented has indisputably and indelibly shaped the world we live in. The first model was patented in 1886, and it was pretty cool. He drove a few demo laps, sold a few at trade shows, and people were pretty impressed. But the invention was still perceived as a kind of toy — like a 19th-century Segway or hoverboard.

In 1889, Carl’s wife Bertha took their two sons and one of the 3rd-gen models on a drive from their home in Mannheim to her parents’ place in Pforzheim 104 km (c. 60 miles) away. Since there were no gas stations, she had to scrounge petroleum distillate from pharmacies along the way, and she didn’t like the way the brakes worked, so she had a cobbler attach some scraps of leather to the brake shoes, inventing brake lining. Oh, and she reportedly hadn’t told Carl about any of this. She just sent him a telegram when they arrived. But he may have already heard by the time the telegram arrived because her practical demonstration caused such a buzz that it was all anybody was talking about. She was perhaps the first woman to perform a mic drop by telegram.

Sisters doin’ it for themselves. And her fit was absolute fire! (Image: Manu Ferrón)

There are two lessons to be drawn from this. First, never mess with a woman named Bertha. Second, if you want people to grasp the revolutionary implications of a new technology, the best way is to show them with a live demonstration.

Thanks for the inspiration, Bertha. If we want the world to grasp the revolutionary implications of the Breez SDK, how it fulfills bitcoin’s promise by turning it into an everyday currency for everyday purchases, and how easily it can transform any app into a thriving bitcoin business, we ought to show them. So we are.

World, I’d like you to meet Misty Breez, our new reference app to showcase the power and simplicity of the Breez SDK.

The original Breez Lightning app runs a node on each mobile device. While kinda miraculous, this also comes with limitations: each device needs to carry a graph of the whole network locally, each device needs an indefinite number of costly payment channels, and the overall complexity means that the best possible UX is merely okay.

Misty Breez is built on the nodeless variant of the Breez SDK, which offers the best UX currently possible in terms of cost and ease of use for self-custodial Lightning (with the trust profile of Liquid). But how easy and economical is that exactly? How big is the difference?

To find out, you could read our extensive documentation and consult our coding samples. Dozens of partners already have and are building great things on that basis.

Or you could try it out for yourself. That’s the first reason we’ve built Misty Breez: to show developers exactly what the Breez SDK can do and how good the UX has become. Play with it. Explore new use cases. Debug with it. Rock out and let the app do the talking.

Lightning is bitcoin, but it’s not a blockchain, at least not directly. Developers coming to Lightning from other corners of the crypto galaxy and mainstream app developers are going to run into objects they may never have seen before: Lightning addresses, invoices, preimages, nodes, routing fees, etc.

All of these peculiar species exist for good reasons, and combined they make a beautiful system, but they’re not exactly self-explanatory. Seeing them in action and how they fit together is perhaps the best way to learn how Lightning works as a payment network.

Perhaps more importantly, Misty Breez can show developers how to deal with such issues in the UX or even how to obfuscate them completely. For example, the SDK can handle offline payments, which have long been unfeasible in Lightning, using mobile notifications if they’re integrated seamlessly, giving users a very familiar-feeling experience. Raw utility can almost never overcome a weak UX (and we can all think of very popular apps with almost no utility but an addictively marvelous UX). So Misty Breez can also give devs new to Lightning a UX benchmark to meet or surpass.

Some devs might not want to go the SDK route. Maybe they don’t want to add Lightning to their app because they don’t have an app yet, and instead they want to bootstrap their own Lightning app. Fair enough.

If you fall into this category, you can build the app of your dreams around Misty Breez and rebrand it accordingly. It’s open source. It’s yours to play with and customize!

Have we tempted you? Are you keen to see how easily users can set up a Lightning address, just like the built-in roys@breez.fun? Are you desperate to see Misty Breez float effortlessly between protocols, including Bolt11, Bolt12, LNURL-Pay, BIP353, Lightning address, and BTC address? Are you just dying to see how offline payments work with mobile notifications?

Then get in on the action. Misty Breez is the Lightning playground, it’s a blast, and there’s room for everyone. The early access release is available now on Android and iOS.

Told you the best way is just to show you. Maybe we should’ve named the app Bertha instead of Misty?