Introducing Liquid Network to the Alby Browser Extension
The recent surge in onchain bitcoin transaction fees, partly fueled by the controversial inscriptions, is sparking conversations about bitcoin second layers and sidechains. High fees drive more adoption into the lightning network, but there's also a growing interest in utilizing other available protocols. And Alby is here today to push forward lightning interoperability with other bitcoin ecosystems, and one of them is the Liquid Network.
Meet the Master Key
Many Alby users enjoy using Nostr on the web safely, storing their private keys locally in their browser extension.
The introduction of Master Key gave the Alby Extension a superpower of having one identity, secured by one 12-word recovery phrase, that can be used on Nostr, Liquid Network, Bitcoin base layer and as login with lightning (LNURL-auth). Keys to those protocols are derived from your Master Key and never leave your local machine, even if you use a web app.
The Master Key is not strictly tied to the lightning wallet you use in the Alby Extension, so you can use the same Nostr or Liquid identity on many different lightning wallets connected to the extension. And if you already have the Master Key, simply use 12-word recovery phrase to import it into the extension (which can be connected to various lightning wallets, including the Alby Account). The extension exposes the signing functionality Nostr, Liquid, bitcoin onchain and lightning through simple to use APIs.
How to use Liquid with Alby
Alby remains primarily a lightning-focused browser extension, continuously committed to safeguarding your funds and keys in the vast and wild landscape of the web. While Alby is not becoming a Liquid-native wallet with full fledged support, it gives you a Liquid address ready to be used on any website.
Today you can already use Liquid with Alby on Boltz Exchange. However there's currently no proper Liquid web wallet you can use to maintain your funds, see your addresses, assets or transactions. Louisinger prepared a Liquid web wallet to demo the signing functionality.
To see your Liquid address, simply connect with the Alby Extension and sign a website request to read your address. In the same way you will sign transaction requests whenever you wish to send funds out of your liquid wallet.
Bounty for Liquid web wallet by Alby and Blockstream
Alby is a proud member of Liquid Federation and as such we encourage all sorts of builders, developers and designers to enter this still unexplored terrain of Liquid on the web.
We're happy to announce a 2.1 mln sats (~$880) bounty in collaboration with Blockstream for building a Liquid web wallet that could be used with Alby. It can be a new wallet or it can be build upon louisinger's web wallet, which is open-source. Submitted wallet should be a fully functioning Liquid Network wallet, allowing to manage both bitcoin and tokens issued on Liquid, and should be characterized with smooth UX that can be easily used by a variety of users. To find out more details visit our Bounties page where you can also view other active challenges.
We hope this inspires more developers to join the call for a new web wallet we haven't seen today in the ecosystem. At Alby, we can't wait to experience what future holds at the intersection of lightning network, Liquid and potentially other bitcoin layers that are yet to come.