Here's our submission video, presenting the USDp experience for Legends of Lightning 10101 presents USDp, the first USD on Lightning

The quest for temporary stability

Historically, traders have taken to disengaging and exiting their exposure to Bitcoin's volatility, typically by using StableCoins.

Interestingly, this use of StableCoins has spread to a whole range of users who are not necessarily traders. These include, but are not limited to, people living in countries affected by high inflation, who are adopting StableCoins for their ease of use and USD indexation, in order to gain visibility over their budget, spending and sometimes even savings.

One big problem: these StableCoins are assets guaranteed by a centralized entity, which brings counterparty risk into the equation, even if you hold the tokens in a self-custodial fashion. Not to mention that these StableCoins circulate on blockchains that are not necessarily decentralized and as sound as Bitcoin, or worse: they are exchanged directly from centralized exchange platforms, thus running cumulative risks for the user.

Given that our application is a self-custodial Bitcoin and Lightning wallet that leverages the Discreet Log Contracts technology to enable users to trade directly from it, we naturally included an option to hedge directly from the application and thus maintain a "stable" position against the USD. (click here to see how it looked like before the competition)

But this seemed insufficient.

Well, if you're going to hold dollars,
better hold it in the best vault in the world: Bitcoin.

That's why we've set ourselves a crazy challenge for the Legends of Lightning competition:

What if we could offer a similar experience to StableCoins, or even better, to a USD account like people are used to - but stay true to our values?

• Bitcoin Only

• Open-source

• 100% self-custodial

• User-centric

• No token (and no issuer)

• No counterparty risk

We believe that bringing USD to Lightning is a great way to drive adoption of Bitcoin and Lightning in general.

Whether they're everyday users who need to budget their monthly expenses, or small businesses with cash to manage: they'll be using USD on Lightning's rails, and helping to to foster the underlying asset and technology : Bitcoin.

You can pay any Lightning invoice using your USD balance

You can receive directly on your USD balance, no matter the wallet used by the sender.

When you own USDp, you own nothing but Bitcoin (and a short position, transparent to the user)

We want the experience to be transparent for the user, to be able to switch easily between sats and USDp and vice versa, to hold, send and receive USD as easily as a classic lightning payment.

USDp project was born

On the backend, the project foundations were ready :

We work with LDK, and our app uses RUST for the back-end and FLUTTER for the front end. To manage all the financial operation from the wallet, we use Discreet Log Contracts.

In the case of USDp, it was already possible to open a short to have a "stable" balance directly from the app, but we were unable to make the balance divisible and partially transferable.

We had to work on the key feature making it all possible : channels resizing (the DLC channels used for financial orders).

You can follow all the work we carried out in full transparency here: https://github.com/get10101/10101

Thanks to the exposure we had from the competition, to help us transform all this back-end machinery into an experience as clear and simple as possible for all users

We also had open-source and public community calls to discuss the design and help us building a pleasant experience for everyone. Special thanks to the Bitcoin Design Community for supporting us in this process.

User experience design, the big challenge

We've decided to redesign our app to make the USDp an integral part of its operation

We've paid a great deal of attention to the home screen, from which it should be possible to clearly distinguish one's USDp balance.

We've reworked the swap experience to make it simple and clear.

We've also integrated USDp into the flows for receiving and sending payments, to create a complete user experience.

You can find mockups and the details of all the work carried out on our public FIGMA project.

USDp is live, you can try it for yourself

Download our app if you want to give USDp a spin!

You can swap sats for USDp and vice versa

You can pay any Lightning invoice using your USD balance

You can receive directly on your USD balance, no matter the wallet used by the sender.

We are still working on the receiving part, but it should be available in the app next week.

Here's our submission video, presenting the USDp experience for Legends of Lightning : 10101 presents USDp, the first USD on Lightning

For comparison, here's a video of what our app looked like at the start of the competition

To summarize :

• Users can hold Bitcoin on-chain, sats on Lightning, or USDp

• Users can hold all 3 at once

• Users can swap sats for USDp, USDp for sats and can resize their balances

• Users can choose to pay using their sat or USDp balance over lightning

• Users can choose to be paid using on their sat or USDp balance over lightning

This innovation will enable hundreds of thousands of people to opt out of StableCoins and adopt Lightning in a self-custodial fashion

What if funding rate events in the trading section of the app
ended up producing financial returns for USDp users?

What if holding dollars on Bitcoin was MUCH more interesting
than holding them at the bank or in Stablecoin?

If you'd like to learn more about this: here's an excellent article on this topic.

What next?

• Finish the "receive USDp" flow

• Add other currencies

• Collect users feedback and continuously enhance the experience

• Educational kits for communities and meetups : people need to know they can now use dollars on Lightning, the self-custodial way : the right way

• We're thinking about the future, and how funding rates could remunerate USDp holders