It’s now easy to send and receive Lightning payments with BlueWallet

With the new updated release of BlueWallet, you can now send and receive Lightning Network payments with just your smartphone.

Using the mobile app, a user only needs a small amount of Bitcoin to open a Lightning channel on the wallet.

Once a payment channel is open, users can send and receive as little as one Satoshi between Lightning payment channels with zero fees.

Connects by default to BlueWallet’s LndHub

By default, the application connects to the GitHub BlueWallet LndHub, but users can also configure payment channels though their own Lightning nodes.

Prior to the update, users only had ‘send’ payment functionality in the wallet application. With the new release, users can now create their own Lightning invoices to make a payment request. This creates a QR code and a corresponding 196-character long text that can be submitted to any Lightning application to receive a payment.

Just this week, we saw Reddit user coinsmash1 post a picture showing that he used the BlueWallet app to play a game of Lightning roulette. Coinsmash1 sent one Satoshi to the website, won an even-money bet, and just one minute later cashed out the two Satoshi winnings back to his BlueWallet.

Not the only Lightning game around

Lightningnetworkstores.com has put together a handy list of Lightning-based games that are currently live on the network. The list of 21 games includes things like slot machines, micro-betting (on things like soccer and baseball), and even auctions for lowest unique bids.

On the site, users can also find a variety of other places and applications to try out Lightning payments. These include a variety of online stores, exchanges, and gated content that can be unlocked through micro-payments.

More apps on the way

At a recent Lightning hackathon hosted by Seoul Bitcoin in South Korea, the teams came together to make some prototype Lightning apps.

Apps developed included a way to counter social media negativity with donations, another where users can get rewards for sharing good content, and finally a chat app that limits the number of chat messages via Lightning micro-payments.

We recently reported on how the Lightning Network has been showing exceptional growth in terms of channel capacity, nodes, and the number of channels open. It’s nice to now see other infrastructure and applications growing to really take this instant micro-payment network to the next level of adoption!