Blitz Wallet has spent 2026 rebuilding around a single idea: one balance, no network juggling. After moving from a multi-network setup (Lightning, Liquid, ecash) to Spark, the team answered six questions from Lightning News about what broke, what Spark costs in trust, and what Bitcoin looks like when using it feels like using a normal financial app.
Here is the interview in full.
You moved from a multi-network setup (Lightning, Liquid, ecash) to Spark. What broke in the old model, and what made Spark the right call?
“The biggest problem was balance fragmentation, but the deeper issue was how to hide that complexity from the user. With a multi-network wallet, you can technically keep separate balances for Lightning, Liquid, and ecash. Traditional financial applications do this all the time. You might have a checking account, savings account, and investment account, each with its own balance. The difference is that their customers generally understand what those accounts are and why their money is separated. We can’t assume the same thing with Bitcoin. If we show a beginner three different balances for Lightning, Liquid, and ecash, we are effectively asking them to understand the underlying Bitcoin infrastructure before they can use their money. For example, a user might have 20,000 sats on Lightning and 15,000 sats on Liquid. They see 35,000 sats in total, but depending on where they are trying to send the money, they may only be able to spend 20,000 sats. The money is theirs, but the wallet has effectively fragmented their purchasing power. So we had two choices. We could expose the different networks and make the user understand why their money was separated, or we could combine the balances and hide that complexity. For the audience we’re building for, we think the second approach is much better. Spark gave us a way to move to a unified balance, while users still have theoretical control over their funds. The important part for us isn’t that users know they’re using Spark, Lightning, or anything else. The important part is that they can easily spend their money.”
The BTC Maps and Bitrefill integrations are about spending sats in the real world. How do you decide which integrations ship?
“Our primary filter is pretty simple: does this make Bitcoin more useful as everyday money, and can someone who knows almost nothing about Bitcoin use it without having to understand the underlying technology? BTC Maps and Bitrefill both pass that test. With BTC Maps, a user can discover places around them that accept Bitcoin. They don’t need to understand Lightning, addresses, channels, or any of the underlying infrastructure. Just open the map, click a place near you, and go spend your Bitcoin. Bitrefill is similar. Instead of asking someone to understand how Bitcoin works, we let them use bitcoin to purchase things they already understand, such as gift cards and other everyday products. That simplicity is important to us. We don’t want integrations just because they are technically interesting or because they add another feature to a wallet. We want them to make Bitcoin more useful.” 
Self-custody wallets always fight the simplicity battle. What does Blitz do differently to keep grandma from losing her sats?
“This is probably the area where we still have the most work to do, and I don’t want to pretend we’ve completely solved it. For the main wallet, we still use a traditional self-custody model. The user is shown their 12-word recovery phrase and is responsible for keeping it safe. Where we have been experimenting is with managed accounts. A managed account is derived from a main wallet, but the person receiving the account doesn’t have to manage a seed phrase themselves. The person who understands Bitcoin can set up and manage the account, while the person using it gets a much simpler experience. That opens up some interesting possibilities for families. A technically experienced family member could help set up an account for a parent, grandparent, child, or close friend without requiring that person to understand seed phrases, backups, or wallet recovery. I think that is a more realistic path toward mainstream adoption than simply telling everyone, ‘Here are 12 words. Don’t lose them.’ But managed accounts introduce their own questions around responsibility, recovery, and what happens if the person managing the account disappears. So we see this as an area we are actively developing, not as a problem we have already solved.”
Where do you see Lightning wallets going over the next five years: one wallet to rule them all, or a hundred niche wallets?
“I think there will probably be a winner-take-most dynamic. Traditional finance is highly fragmented. Different countries have different regulations, banking systems, payment networks, and financial products, so having many localized financial apps makes sense. Bitcoin is fundamentally different. The underlying monetary network is global. If one wallet eventually provides the best combination of payments, savings, spending, merchant integrations, and everyday usability, there is no obvious reason it couldn’t work across countries. I don’t think that means there will only be one wallet. There will always be wallets designed for specific users and use cases. Some people will want advanced privacy features, some will want hardware integration, some will want trading, and some will want specialized tools. But I do think there is likely to be a dominant general-purpose Bitcoin wallet that most ordinary users use, surrounded by a long tail of more specialized products.”
Let’s be critical for a minute. Spark’s trust model leans on its operators, which is a different animal from pure Lightning self-custody. What do you say to the critics?
“I think the critics are right to be critical. There is no reason to pretend that Spark has the same trust model as holding bitcoin directly on-chain. It doesn’t. If your priority is minimizing trust assumptions and having complete control over your funds, on-chain Bitcoin remains the standard. The question for us is whether there is a useful middle ground between maximum sovereignty and maximum usability. One thing we’ve done is automatically synchronize users’ Spark leaves so that their wallet maintains the information needed to attempt a unilateral exit if an operator becomes unavailable. But I also don’t want to oversell that. A unilateral exit is technical, it isn’t necessarily economically attractive, and not every situation is equally recoverable. Recovering funds can require on-chain transactions and therefore on-chain fees. So we view this as a risk reduction mechanism, not as proof that the operator trust assumption doesn’t exist. Ultimately, every payment system makes tradeoffs. Our goal is to make those tradeoffs explicit while giving normal users a much simpler Bitcoin experience.”
Follow-up: on-chain surveillance and the Travel Rule, Blitz added:
“We try to be honest about what we are and what we are not. Blitz is not a privacy-maximalist wallet. Our primary focus is making Bitcoin usable for ordinary people who are coming from traditional financial applications. That said, privacy still matters. We were the first wallet to enable Spark’s privacy mode, which helps prevent a user’s balance and transaction history from being publicly visible through Spark explorers. We also structure the product so that most user activity happens off-chain. When users receive on-chain bitcoin, we move it into Spark rather than leaving users to manage on-chain UTXOs themselves. For on-chain receiving, we intentionally keep the experience simple by giving users a single receiving address. This is a UX tradeoff. Generating a new address for every transaction improves privacy, but it also introduces another way for inexperienced users to lose funds or become confused about where their money went. We chose simplicity for our target user.”
What’s next on the roadmap for the rest of 2026?
“2026 has already been a huge year of development for us. For the rest of the year, the focus is less about adding features for the sake of adding features and more about making Bitcoin actually useful as everyday money. That means continuing to improve the basic wallet experience, making it easier to receive and spend bitcoin, expanding the places where people can use it, and reducing the amount of Bitcoin-specific knowledge someone needs to have. We’re also continuing to explore ways to make Bitcoin easier to use for people who aren’t necessarily Bitcoin enthusiasts. Ultimately, the question we’re trying to answer is pretty simple: what would Bitcoin look like if using it were as easy as using a normal financial app? That’s the direction we’re building toward.”
Blitz Wallet is available at blitzwalletapp.com. Lightning News has previously covered the wallet’s manual channel rebalancing guide.
