A new atomic-swap powered wallet, Liquality, just released a feature for users to spend bitcoin and other coins at online crypto merchants without having to manage addresses or QR codes.
Liquality is a browser extension wallet like Metamask, except instead of supporting only ether and its tokens, Liquality can hold bitcoin, ether, crypto dollars like DAI, USDT, USDC and UNI, and now “bitcoin DeFi” tokens from the RSK network.
The ConsenSys-backed wallet launched last autumn and allows users to swap coins in their wallet, thanks to an old trick known as “on-chain atomic swaps.” These swaps use complex cryptography to trade assets from different blockchains between two or more parties without a user having to relinquish their keys to a counterparty.
For Liquality, this means its users can trade between bitcoin and ether (or crypto dollars like USDC) right on the wallet.
“Our goal has always been to give people secure and easy tools to interact with this new digital economy,” the wallets founder, Alex Min, told CoinDesk.
Liquality wants to simplify crypto wallet UX
With this update, the wallet now also provides “one-click” transactions with popular bitcoin-accepting gift-card vendor Bitrefill and payment portal OpenNode, among others. When checking out using these services, the wallet automatically fetches the receiving address for the user.
The one-click pay feature works with any wallet that has integrated URI schemes for bitcoin, Min told CoinDesk. This includes popular open-source processor BTCPay Server, as well.
“We believe this upcoming release will not only improve the in-browser bitcoin experience for users, merchants and app developers (most of whom are still transacting on-chain), but also help the nascent Bitcoin web app ecosystem grow with an easy-to-use-and-develop-with, in-browser hot wallet,” Min said.
Liquality currently acts as the counterparty for the wallet’s swaps. Min told CoinDesk the wallet processed $4 million in swap volume in March from 4,000 active weekly users.
When asked if Liquality will look to adding Lightning Network support in the future, Min said it’s not high up on the wallet’s roadmap.
In lieu of Lightning, Liquality recently integrated with RSK, a Bitcoin sidechain built by IOV Labs, and supports the dollar on chain (DOC) crypto dollar from Sovryn, a decentralized lending market built on RSK.
These networks offer cheaper, faster transactions than Bitcoin’s primary network using special trade-offs and tricks; Lightning is a tech stack built on top of bitcoin that is trustless and non custodial, while RSK is an independent network run by a federation of trusted counterparties.