Bitcoin Lightning Wallet
Product designer, paired with one dev, weeklies with stakeholders.
–
Aug 2025
iOS + Chrome extension
Context
A reference wallet to figure out what it takes to swap in/out of lightning with no custodian involved. Built to find the hard parts of the Portal Swaps SDK first, so real products built on it wouldn't have to.
Non-custodial lightning is not easy, unlike altcoins... the wallet was a node, users ran their own lightning infra.
Shipped the fully non-custodial version before any managed services... and felt every sharp edge, then started abstracting away.
Each swap on multiple nodes, and any single one failing broke the swap. We added a status monitor so you know current status and, if needed, how to fix it.
Ran on testnet, with an incentivized campaign pushing real swap volume. Did its job as a reference... surfaced friction, fed straight into how the swaps sdk was built.