The public beta from 15 September lets users use their existing seed phrase for a Lightning wallet dedicated to everyday payments.
BitBox is adding Lightning payments to the smartphone BitBoxApp, with a public beta planned from 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 users already have for their BitBox02. Creating the new wallet therefore does not require an additional 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 the internet-connected smartphone, and is intended for small amounts and everyday spending. Long-term savings 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 the Lightning balance to top it up, or move them in the opposite direction. The integration therefore brings top-up and transfer operations between the two wallets into 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 Lightning to be used without manually managing a node, channels or liquidity. The company states that 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 dependence a “reasonable trade-off” for a wallet intended for small amounts and everyday payments.
The clarification also concerns the backup: restoring the wallet on a new phone requires access to Spark services to retrieve wallet data. As BitBox acknowledges, the seed recreates the keys, but does not contain all that data. Access to funds therefore continues to depend on the operator’s cooperation: keeping the recovery words is not enough to make the user independent of 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 an upcoming version of the Breez SDK. The app therefore lacks a function that allows the user 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 mobile BitBoxApp. To start using it, they will need to create the Lightning wallet with their BitBox.
