Topic: Aqua wallet - Bitcoin, Lightning, Liquid - page 4. (Read 1488 times)

There was an old Aqua wallet from Blockstream, but Jan3 took over development from them.

They are totally different company but they cooperate and they are both part of federation system for Liquid network, with other companies around the word.

Not at all, even grandmas can use this wallet, it is that simple.
However, this is not meant to be LN-only wallet, but it uses seed words so it is much safer than custodial LN wallets.

I watched it, very good show.
Guys from Jan3 confirmed that Aqua source code will be released as open source in one or two weeks max, they are currently cleaning the code from junk.

L-USDT is the same as Tether but not using any altcoin blockchains.
You can easily swap L-USDT for L-BTC, and fees are much lower than on-chain.

This is only for third-party partner services, like upcoming debit cards or similar stuff they are going to offer.

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Aqua wallet just got approved and released on g00gle Play store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.aquawallet.android

Perhaps the original idea was to make the wallet custodial. A non-custodial wallet has no way to enforce KYC on a user who can simply ignore their requests and take their coins elsewhere if they don't want to comply. Only a custodial service can freeze your assets and ask you to verify your identity to regain access.

I sill have not deposited any value onto Aqua, yet part of my curiosity also includes how they might allow for swapping between assets, and it appears that the "market place" has not gone live yet, and I was wondering if that was the main place to swap between assets, and then if there were local laws, then they might have initially been considering ways to comply to various local jurisdictions, but maybe they are still trying to figure out how they might want to activate some of the swapping features that might cause some regulatory attention from various jurisdictions.

We can see that their marketplace interface includes:  "coming soon" announcements for buying, swaps, paying bills and debit cards.^**  



**Note that for illustrative purposes, the App allowed me to choose El Salvador  (you can see by the flag on the upper right corner of the screenshot) as my jurisdiction.  I chose with the consideration that maybe El Salvador might not have any jurisdictional regulatory obstacles.... but still I am not actually in El Salvador at the moment

I cannot see any other place to carry out the swaps (for example to swap from BTC or from one of the forms of Tether into lightning network tokens) that are actually active rather than in the "coming soon" category.  

Maybe one of the shortest term objectives would be trying to figure out ways around (or to minimize) various kinds of onchain bitcoin fees during periods in which it is experiencing high fees, yet to attempt to do so without necessarily giving any support to shitcoins.. .. so maybe once BTC is on the Aqua wallet, then it could be converted into lightning network tokens for way less fees than it might cost to do so through other onchain ways during high fee times?

According to a review published on Stacker News, they originally had terms which stated that Aqua Wallet had the right to collect KYC information.


That has since been removed and replaced with the following: ”AQUA Wallet does not collect, process or store any personal information or documents.”

The target audience for this wallet seems to be USDT users on altcoin blockchains and people who want to use Lightning with minimal risk. By the looks of it, Liquid still has a long way to go in convincing users they should adopt it.

Exchanges like Binance allow you to decide the network you want to use when you withdraw your USDT. Regardless of what type you deposited, you can withdraw a different one. They don't care. What's important is depositing the correct type of asset into the right address. The Omni layer USDT has lost its importance because you have blockchains like Tron and Ethereum that are quicker and cheaper to use. I didn't know that Binance doesn't even list the Omni layer one, but that tells you everything you need to know about its popularity.   

You gave us a summary what we should expect when we download the new Aqua wallet. But you forgot one thing. How have they increased security in the Aqua wallet app. I see that the main focus of the team is to improve the speed of transaction and ease the process of using mobile wallet. However, its essential we to place security as priority. Since the App is on testing i would a little amount and see how it works tomorrow.

Absolutely. This is what i have been thinking. It seems they rebranded from Blockstream and changed a few of the UI, Colors and functionality. Of which they introduced some new features in the App. This is because I noticed they use the same codebase. In conclusion it's just a product under the Blockstream company that was excluded to be a product on its own.

Oh i see its closed source 

Just checked on x now and saw this reply

Thanks for that further explication (or explanation). 

With that, I am thinking that Aqua Wallet is going to need to be added to Blockstream's list of places to get or swap into or out of Liquid Tether and/or Liquid BTC. 

With so many different tokens (or seeming tokens), no wonder some of us (maybe just me?) get(s) confused about which things are shitcoins (or attached to shitcoins) and which ones are more pegged to bitcoin and bitcoin principles (even if there tend to be various centralizing tendencies in some of the ways that we might want to interact with Tether, versus Liquid versus Lightning Network.. in contrast to how many layers we might be away from bitcoin's main chain).

I think omni is not exactly a second layer. They are on chain transactions.

They are more likely 1st layer token, like ethereum tokens.

Liquid Tether is probably some 2nd layer (liquid) token.

Tether on omni were on chain transactions

https://www.omnilayer.org/

This is how I understand it, I might be not 100% correct but I think it is different than 2nd layer  transactions.

As of now, it seems that only few exchanges are offering deposits and withdrawals for Tether on Liquid network actually, and except Bitfinex they are mostly small or local. I hope some bigger exchanges will accept it soon, otherwise we will need to open another account on another exchange with likely another KYC requirement to address if we want to deal with it.
https://help.blockstream.com/hc/en-us/articles/900005355626-How-do-I-get-Liquid-based-Tether-USDt-
Fortunately, it seems that there are more exchanges supporting Liquid BTC https://help.blockstream.com/hc/en-us/articles/900000629383-Which-platforms-support-the-Liquid-Network-

I guess that is what I meant, and you answered my question because I did not realize or consider what layer I might have had been on in the past.

I have never transacted in Tether in any kind of way except being on the exchanges.. although I think that when I had a Bitfinex account between about 2016 and 2017, I had Tether on that account, but I don't know what form of Tether, because when they forced all USA users off of their platform, I am pretty sure that I just converted all of that to BTC to transfer my BTC off of that account.

From about 2018 to 2021, I had a Binance account that used Tether (but I don't recall which type), and when they forced me to stop using their service in 2021, and per their recommendation, I decided to move all of my then Binance balances over to a new account that I created on their BinanceUS branch, and I am pretty sure that I transferred the Tether, but I had not remembered whether that was on Ethereum, even though it appears that the Tether that I currently hold on BinanceUS is ethereum based.. that seems to be the default.    But if I go to withdraw Tether it gives me the below six options



Note: Avax C-Chain, BNB Smart Chain (BEP20), Ethereum (ERC20), Polygon (unavailable), Solana and Tron (TRC20).  There is not even a Bitcoin option of apparently Omni or Liquid.


By the way, I recall that BinanceUS made me switch from Tether to dollars in 2021 (or maybe I did it on my own), and then earlier this year, they discontinued dollars, so I chose to switch to Tether, and I have been using Tether on BinanceUS ever since, even though I had not realized it was the Ethereum based on. .or maybe it does not really matter which one of the bases it is since they are holding it.. but if I am going to transfer it, then I have options to use either the ethereum or the tron version if I were going to move it over to Aqua... since neither Liquid nor Omni seems to be available with BinanceUS... which is all news to me.. if I am not repeating myself a bit too much on this point. hahahaha

If by BTC Tether you mean Tether on Omni layer, you have to know that Tether is discontinuing its support and it might be hard or even impossible to exchange them after next September. So it's better to use Tether from other blockchain/network for now, you can find the current balance of each ones(currently 14) here : https://tether.to/en/transparency/#usdt

https://tether.to/en/supported-protocols
And as Pmalek said above it's not the same protocol and not the same token as the Liquid one.

When you say BTC tether, I assume you mean the asset on the Omni layer, right? Both Omni and Liquid are layer 2 solutions for Bitcoin that allow the creation and transfer of different tokens (in this case the tether token). They are not the same protocol. I think Omni layer was the first network where the tether token resided. The Liquid network came later.

The last few days, BTCSessions (Ben Perrin) had been talking about Aqua Wallet, and in his latest episode of "Why Are We Bullish?," he had Samson Mow as one of the guests who had been involved in Aqua Wallet from the start (during time that Mow was still at Blockstream - as is shown in that above 2020 press release), and seems to still be involved with Aqua wallet, and Mow mentioned that the source code would be released as open-source within a few days, a week or at least a relatively short-period of time^tm - even though Mow seemed to be poo-pooing the importance of open-sourcing (and usually I like Mow - but I found his poo-pooing comment to be kind of irritating and patronizing).

I still have not used Aqua Wallet, yet I downloaded it and created a wallet - and I was looking at the Aqua assets page.



It shows three kinds of Tether (Liquid, Ethereum and Tron), and I am wondering what is "Liquid Tether"?  Is Liquid Tether the same as BTC Tether?  or is there something different about Liquid Tether as compared with BTC Tether?   Maybe it is just naming and I have to play with some of it more and I might be able to answer this particular question.

You are right, it is.
Here is a press release announcing the wallet back in September 2020. It's a wallet created by the Blockstream and Blockstream Green developers, probably meant to popularize the Liquid network. Even the logo is almost identical. Same style and font, but with the addition of a new color.

As the name suggests, to self-moderate them the way they think is right without having to report unwanted spam to mods, hoping they will remove it. There is no controversy with self-moderated topics unless they are opened in boards like Reputation or for the purpose of preventing the truth.

Closed source is a non starter for me.  The fiat shitcoin integrations show their priorities are way off. 

Also, what's up with people posting self moderated topics?   

Isn't aqua wallet an old blockstream wallet?

There is a 2020 topic here.

Maybe they broke apart from blockstream? But they are still using Liquid, like green wallet.

Aqua is not in blockstream.com website anymore.

Edit:
I need to receive an LN payment.. downloaded this wallet to give a try
Aqua wallet LN is a bit frustrating.

It says "don't leave screen until payment is received " when I generated the invoice.

We are still so far from mass adoption...

I guess the fees are deducted from the currency you are sending, similarly to how centralized exchanges do it. You send a certain amount of USDT tokens and pay the fees in USDT. When we are on the topic of Tron, all addresses have a certain amount of daily energy they can use to move TRX for free each day. That means free transactions with 0 fees. But since USDT tokens are considered smart contract interactions, they require more "energy", which is usually not enough for free transactions unless you have a significant amount of staked coins. 

Liquidity is coming from Boltz and Sideswap.

You are going to pay some fees when using USDT from tron blockchain, but you would do the same thing even if using tron crap, unless you are messing around with staking, voting, and energy bullshit.

It's available for Android with APK file, until g00gle play store approves it.

Nice video to watch with Samson Mow and Prince Filip talking abotu Aqua wallet:
https://youtu.be/yi7a2n6VMH4

Short video review by theBTCcourse:
https://youtu.be/9b_VYjKAc-s

I wonder how they do it and where the liquidity comes from? If I receive USDT on Tron and can spend it without owning any Tron tokens, someone must pay the network fees for me in TRX, while there is a conversion in the background of some of my assets in an equivalent amount. I have never owned any assets on Liquid layer.
The link to the App Store for AQUA Wallet is working now with a notification that the app is only available for iPhones.

Yes it has LN, Liquid and Bitcoin onchain.
I think they are using something similar like Breeze wallet for lightning, and for swaps they are using Boltz and Sideswap.
Good news that source code for Aqua wallet will be open source and released in public soon, but let's wait for confirmation of that.

So far I am really impressed with this wallet and how easy and simple is to use it, but expect to have few bugs in first few releases.
This could easily become one of my main spend mobile wallets... and no more need to use other wallets for stable coins.
Few improvements I would like to see is hardware wallet support, desktop app, and showing sats and or mbtc value.