Bitcoin Connect User Experience

Find Inspiration Where Others Look Away

In terms of interconnectivity of wallets, products and protocols, Ethereum and other crypto stuff is still somewhat ahead from what we currently have in Bitcoin stack. This fortunately changes quickly with a burst of Nostr-related solutions like NWC, but also thanks to WebLN, LNURL and other interesting projects that we are being developed by many great devs and designers out there.

But I still believe that we can learn a lot from crypto/web3 projects. One of those projects actually heavily inspired Bitcoin Connect, both in terms of design and UX. It's called Wallet Connect and became a widely used way of connecting EVM wallets into different websites. One of the successes of their adoption is great design and well adjusted UX, which was a heavy inspiration for us (even though the underlying mechanism of both products is quite different).

WalletConnect and their Web3Modal was a big inspiration for Bitcoin Connect

One Button To Connect Any Wallet

While lightning wallets connectivity works already on desktop browsers with extensions like Alby, that allow for seemsless, QRcode-less experience of paying with bitcoin on the web, it's quite hard to provide a similar solution on mobile browsers. To this day major mobile browsers like Chrome, Firefox or Safari haven't implemented browser extensions, so the only solution to use WebLN apps is for the wallet to have a browser embedded within, same way like Fedi does this.

Fedi allows each federation to include web apps of their choice, including those using WebLN.

The problem with Fedi solution is, you only can use the app with WebLN that are chosen by the federation. Similarly in Breez, you only can interact with apps of their choice.

Our vision is to embed lightning everywhere. That means - If the website supports WebLN, you can use it with just your daily browser. As a user, If I want to use stacker.news and tip people I want to do it in my favourite browser, I don't really want to do it from a wallet, which is never well adjusted for browsing experience.

Bitcoin Connect is designed to help lightning web app creators to allow WebLN payments on any device or browser their users choose. Roland created a simple package that we hope this is a step into the future where lightning users just can log into the app and don't need to pull up their mobile wallet each time they want to tip someone, pay for microservice or check their balance.

We wanted to minimize the hustle of integration the modal as much as we can, so UI wise developer just needs to choose a primary color of the button, and dark or light theme. However during Nostrasia, talking with creators such as Pablo or hzrd149 we received some requests for more customization, such as allowing for not requesting user balance, or chaning/removing bitcoin connect logo. I think we will think of more customisation option in the future.

Learning Framer

Bitcoin Connect landing page is also the first landing page I built with Framer, a no-code tool for building websites. The tool is great, but was also a learning curve for sure. Lately I did some improvements into it and now I am quite happy with how it looks, so let us know what you think about it: https://bitcoin-connect.com/