During BTCPrague 2023 we met for a beer with the creator of Zeus, Evan Kaloudis (@evankaloudis of@ZeusLN) and a couple more LND guys like George Tsagkarelis (@GeorgeTsag ).
We talked about lightning mostly, and about the amazing new features Evan is working on for Zeus. I can’t share much as I’m not sure which ones he’s announced or not, but I can assure you that they are very bullish and might change the way self-custody in lightning is done.
At the end of the night we had to pay for our beers, so I told the waitress I wanted to tip her in bitcoin. She had hovered a few times and we mentioned we were there for a bitcoin conference. So I said, “I want to give you a tip in bitcoin, would you like that?”
She said, “Sure, but how?”
“Just download an app. It’s a wallet.”
Now, ironically, with Zeus there, we couldn’t go with a self-custodial option. So I suggested Wallet of Satoshi, naturally. I showed her how to receive and I tipped her some sats. Then the other guys chipped in, tipping with their wallets around the table.
It was the end of her shift, but she was curious to find out more about this bitcoin thing and where she could spend it. @KenobiNakamoto was there to explain some more things to her with his usual enthusiasm.
Now, I know some bitcoiners cry out that a custodial lightning wallet is not the way to orange pill and so on. But this was a girl who had no idea what we were talking about. Curious to know, but lacking the background. You can’t complicate things with technical hurdles. Even Evan was okay with it.
Fast-forward to today and Evan just sent me the beta version of his Zeus app, with the new features. One of them is a self-custodial solution, working in similar ways to what Phoenix Wallet does.
So, when this is live, in that scenario with orange-pilling the waitress we could have used Zeus and set her up on a proper path to self-custody from the get-go.
A note, I had to delete the old app to install the new apk file. During loading, Zeus asked if I wanted the fast setup or the advanced. I selected fast setup and it started spinning up a node, which only took a couple of minutes. (I don’t know what the advanced options are.)
As you can see, this has created a self-custodial lightning node on my phone. It runs on a Lightning Service Provider which can be changed, so it’s not entirely dependent on Zeus infrastructure.
And there’s a prompt to back up your seed words, which I did.
Now let’s load it up with sats!
I tapped to accept funds, inputted 100.000 sats and there was a prompt that if this was to be paid over lightning, I would be charged a fee. That is for the channel opening. I clicked through the explanations, Zeus helpfully sends you to a liquidity explanation page on the web. Anyway, I went ahead and created the invoice.
You can see the NFC options which are very cool, and the Unified, Lightning and On-Chain options for the invoice. Theoretically the unified should work on everything. It doesn’t always work but you can choose the other options if you encounter any problems.
I paid the invoice, and voila!
This cost me 10.000 sats and now I have a channel with outbound and matching inbound liquidity. I’m assuming the inbound is created by the Zeus LSP.
And I’m ready to go ahead and use lightning as normal.
All in all, it was very simple to use and pretty much straight-forward. Now, I am familiar with the Zeus interface myself, but it should be easy enough for a newbie to use.
You can download Zeus wallet from here https://zeusln.app/
This beta version will be available soon.
As for the rest of the amazing features, I can’t tell you much but I guarantee you that it will help shape the future of the lightning network.
Did you enjoy this story? Then send some sats to the author!
100% of your tips go directly to the author. Need a wallet? Find one here.
