22 July 2024
The Breez SDK is launching integration of the Liquid Network in addition to their support for the Lightning Network. Breez SDK has been a great success in making integration of Lightning support easier for developers. Used by Relai, Cake Wallet, CrowdHealth, and numerous other companies who have built out support for the Lightning Network.
Liquid support represents the next phase of significant expansion of the Breez SDK. Liquid is a federated sidechain network utilizing L-BTC, a bitcoin backed token custodied by the members of the federation operating the Liquid Network.
It is important to note that while people using the Liquid Network do self custody their L-BTC, having control to freely move it on Liquid how they want, the actual BTC backing it is custodied by members of the federation on the mainchain. This means that strictly speaking, while internal use of the network itself is self-custodial, entry and exit to and from the network is somewhat permissioned.
Why Liquid?
Breez SDK is integrating Liquid support to offer developers and users more optionality. Every different way of using Bitcoin comes with different trade-offs, both positive and negative.
Liquid does not require the use of payment channels, meaning that users do not have to deal with set up fees or liquidity management, or require an LSP to manage the frictions and complexities of making use of their bitcoin. This also removes the possibility of surprise channel closures and the fees this winds up creating for the end user.
This also removes a lot of complexity on the developer side, leaving less moving parts for them to manage when integrating Liquid support into a product or wallet. No channel management, no routing management, just basic on-chain fund management with basic send and receive support. Given that the SDK is tailored for developers, this is a new option for SDK users with minimal implementation complexity.
Interaction With Lightning
Any wallet integrating Liquid through the Breez SDK can also still seamlessly interact with the Lightning Network to maintain a streamlined and interoperable user experience. Powered by Boltz, the SDK supports submarine swaps. This allows any users custodying their funds on the Liquid Network to seamlessly send and receive Lightning payments by making use of an atomic swap between the Liquid Network and the Lightning network.
The Lightning swap functionality supports LNURL-Pay, LNURL-Withdraw, LNURL-auth, and is planning to soon integrate support for fiat on and off-ramps. As well, in the future support will be added for multi-device and multi-app support, allowing users to integrate with a single wallet balance across different devices and applications.
Where to find
To find out more, the technical documentation for the Breez SDK Liquid support can be found here.