Now You Can Pay in Bitcoin (BTC) From Apple Smartwatch

Bitcoin (BTC) ecosystem is growing and now includes Apple’s smartwatch as people can now receive bitcoin’s lightning payments through app with just a few taps on your smartwatch.

The newest feature of the Apple watch was launched earlier by one of the most popular lightning wallets in the cryptoverse, Bluewallet. It is an open source project created by only three developers, who consider themselves as bitcoiners, community members, hodlers and bitcoin maximalists.

Igor Korsakov, Marcos Rodriguez and Nuno Coelho were all extremely frustrated by the current status of mobile wallet development on bitcoin, according to their Medium post:

Most of the wallets out there became a shitcoin horror show. Onboarding users to pure speculative useless tokens, where the creators are making money while the normal user is being introduced to scams, frauds on top of being directed to the least interesting aspect of the technology.

The trio is on a mission to fix and provide a solution for the bitcoin wallet scene by offering the crypto community a wallet that is focused first and foremost on the users. Hence they are dedicating all their resources to security and user experience.

The Blue Wallet came out last year in December and lightning wallets were initially among the four main features that were a part of the roadmap. The lightning network protocol is aimed to bring “unfairly cheap and fast transactions”. Other features in the roadmap included:

Batch TX

Ability to pay multiple addresses with a single transaction. Save on fees and optimize blockspace usage.

MultiSig TX

Add security to your funds. Each transaction requires M of N signatures (with keys stored on different physical devices with Blue Wallet).

Plug your node

Plug your own Bitcoin Core node for a maximum sovereignty.

Why would people want to receive lightning transactions via their smartwatches, considering smartwatches aren’t as popular as smart phones? But their use is becoming increasingly popular especially for tracking health and the accessibility to view notification without actually having to take out the phone.

So Bluewallet is testing to see if Apple watch users might be interested in using that accessibility for Bitcoin payments. Product and UX engineer Nuno Coelho said:

Sometimes the convenience of just [receiving bitcoin] with two taps from your wrist can be a relevant user experience, especially on the go or if you need to be fast

The new app will allow the users of Apple watches to receive Bitcoin over its payment technology. Users can use their smartwatch app to generate a QR code, a square-shaped barcode that someone else can then scan with their smartphone to send over a payment. Bluewallet first revealed a sneak peek of their lightning app in a tweet weeks ago.

Apple watch owners of the bitcoin community can download the new application from the iTunes Store to experience lightning payments on their wrists however, it should be kept in mind that the new feature will take a toll on the smart watch as the app will update several times in a day, which will contribute additional battery drainage.

This new integration with the Apple watch is a big step towards broadening the accessibility of the bitcoin ecosystem. But this app is framed as an experiment and Coehlo stressed on that, since lightning technology itself is still very experimental. Furthermore the future of this app depends on how well the users respond to it, as the team is not sure of how many users will actually want to use the app.


According to Coehlo, if they receive positive feedback then they’ll invest more time on the project adding that it’s a very early stage industry so they’re trying to figure out how to build this stuff properly.

The Bluewallet team is also working on other features in order to expand their wallet further, as they want to move from being a third-party service because it minimizes consumer trust. And consumer trust is their most important goal for the time being.


Abeer Anwaar


Leave a Reply
