Bitcoin Connect: New Wallet Page, V3 Planning, New Success Animation

This week in Bitcoin Connect we had some PRs merged from first time contributors:

• A new page for users who don't have a wallet yet. Bitcoin Connect could be the first time a person experiences a lightning payment or a lightning-powered website. This was contributed by Alan, a student from El Salvador working with Alby for three months as part of the CUBO+ program. Alan also worked on a PR to enable fiat displays for the wallet balance and amounts on the payment screen. However through this PR we realized that the UI in Bitcoin Connect could be simplified further to consistently show a single currency on the button and within the modal. Finally, he's currently making some replit example templates for different app usecases to integrate bitcoin connect.

  

• An amazing new success animation replacing the low quality gif from hzrd149, the creator of Nostrudel. It reduces Bitcoin Connect's package size over 220kb.

  

I showed Bumi from Alby around Chiang Mai this week and we spent quite a few hours discussing and reviewing Bitcoin Connect and also a number of architectural issues and reviewing existing issues, closing some that didn't make sense and tagging all we could with "good first issue" to help guide contributors to get started. We came up with multiple improvements which require some breaking changes, so we are planning a brand new version of Bitcoin Connect: Version 3.

Version 3 again simplifies the developer API (even less lines of code needed to integrate into apps) and significantly decreases the complexity of the internals of Bitcoin Connect, making it easier to implement and easier to contribute to.

That's all for this week!

Roland, Rene and Jakub