The public beta from 15 September lets users use their existing seed phrase for a Lightning wallet dedicated to everyday payments.
BitBox is integrating Lightning payments into the smartphone BitBoxApp, with a public beta scheduled for 15 September 2026. According to the Swiss company’s announcement, the feature will be available for all its hardware wallets and will allow users to create and manage a Lightning wallet directly from the app already used for on-chain funds.
The device derives the Lightning wallet from the backup the user already has for their BitBox02. Creating the new wallet therefore does not require another recovery phrase to write down and store. The same backup serves both the on-chain wallet and the one intended for payments.
The two wallets remain separate. The Lightning wallet is a hot wallet, a wallet on an internet-connected smartphone, and is intended for small amounts and everyday spending. Long-term savings instead remain in the on-chain wallet protected by BitBox hardware.
From the BitBoxApp, users will be able to transfer satoshis from the on-chain wallet to their Lightning balance to top it up, or move them in the opposite direction. The integration therefore brings together top-up and transfer operations between the two wallets in the app, without requiring users to switch to another wallet or service.
Announced features include scanning and paying Lightning invoices, sending and receiving bitcoin, and the ability to obtain a personal Lightning address. Payments can be managed directly from the smartphone.
The integration uses the Breez SDK and Spark. According to BitBox, this architecture allows users to use Lightning without manually managing a node, channels or liquidity. The company says the wallet is non-custodial. In an announcement on its website, however, BitBox acknowledges that transfers depend on a group of Spark operators and that security requires a minimum number of them to cooperate and follow the protocol. The company considers this dependency a “reasonable trade-off” for a wallet intended for small amounts and everyday payments.
The clarification also concerns the backup: to restore the wallet on a new phone, users must access Spark services and retrieve the wallet data. As BitBox acknowledges, the seed recreates the keys, but does not contain all of that data. Access to funds therefore continues to depend on the operator’s cooperation: storing the recovery words is insufficient to make the user independent from that infrastructure.
Above all, unilateral exit has not yet been implemented in the BitBoxApp. The company writes: “We plan to support unilateral exits in the future”, with a forthcoming version of the Breez SDK. The app therefore lacks a feature that allows users to move bitcoin back on-chain without the operators’ cooperation. In the current beta, the wallet is de facto custodial, because the ability to return on-chain depends on the operators’ good faith. Calling it non-custodial is operationally inaccurate, because possession of the keys alone does not guarantee independent recovery of funds.
Existing users will be able to access the feature by updating the BitBoxApp mobile app. To start using it, they will need to create the Lightning wallet with their BitBox.
