Summary

Message signing with LNDhub and LNbits accounts through Alby has been changed. We standardized the way signing works with such wallets. With this Alby is now compatible with BlueWallet for logins.

Unfortunately, this is a breaking change and if you rely on the old signing mechanism to login to websites you have to enable the Legacy signing for LNDhub and LNbits option in the Settings page of Alby.

Background

BlueWallet added lnurl-auth support. But compared to Alby the methods of signing (i.e. the secret to create the private key) differed. Consequently, a user with the same LNDhub account in Alby and BlueWallet would get different lnurl-auth results. That means users could not access the same accounts on websites, where lnurl-auth was used to login. To become compatible Alby updated the way how the key and signature is created. This is similar for LNbits.

We also hope that this generalized, compatible way of secret creation will be adopted by other wallets that provide similar features.

We believe interoperability is important and thus this change is needed.

Who is affected

You are very likely affected if you linked Alby to your BlueWallet LNDhub or to LNbits. That is the case if you used your BlueWallet account with Alby for instance. At the same time you used these connected wallets with Alby to login to Bitcoin Lightning apps such as stacker.news or LNMarkets. The recent change creates compatibility but also prevents you from signing in to your old account on these websites. But, don’t worry. Your funds are still accessible.

What you can do

If you find yourself in the situation that you suddenly are logged into a new account, than you used to be previously with Alby, you can opt out of the new signing method and enable the legacy signing for LNDhub and LNBits.

All you need is to open the Alby browser extension and go to the Settings page:

In the Settings menu you will find a the toggle to active the previous state. That allows you to sign in to your existing accounts on these website with Alby again.

However, we strongly recommend to empty these accounts and switch to the new ones (i.e. the new singing method).

If you encounter any problems, please contact us on support@getalby.com or join our Telegram channel.

Sorry for any inconvenience.