Announcing Muun 2.0
By: Dario Sneidermanis
Tags: Lightning Network, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Wallet, Cryptocurrency, Product

Today, we are announcing the launch of Muun 2.0, a big iteration of the mobile wallet for bitcoin and lightning. What excites us the most about it is that it is much closer to our vision: building a bitcoin wallet that makes self-custody easy and safe for every bitcoin user in the world.

Muun 2.0 arrives at a crucial time. Bitcoin is under the watchful eye of many people, many of whom are new to the ecosystem. Now is the time to show them how powerful and simple bitcoin can be. Because, though bitcoin as technology can be incredibly complex, bitcoin as a solution is wonderfully simple.

The chasm

In the adoption of any successful technology, there is a chasm between the early adopters and the mainstream users. As we launch Muun 2.0, bitcoin is crossing its own chasm.

If you are reading this, you are probably an early adopter. You have been following bitcoin for a while. You educate yourself about it. You even educate others. You value self-custody. You see how bitcoin is finally happening.

Now think about the last time you onboarded someone to bitcoin. They are probably part of the mainstream. They hear about bitcoin mainly from you. They use the products you recommend them. They kind of follow your advice on not keeping money in custodial services, but ‘MtGox’ doesn’t even ring a bell. They are excited to try the ‘bitcoin thing’.

There’s a good chance bitcoin will look somewhat different on the other side of the chasm. The early adopters and mainstream users care about different things. This shapes the products and services they use. However, there’s one aspect of bitcoin we can’t afford to lose on the way: self-custodianship.

Self-custodianship is often understood as having control of your private keys. This misses a key point: just having your keys won’t be enough if bitcoin itself becomes sufficiently hard to use.

Imagine a scenario where bitcoin fees skyrocket (yes, now they are high, but 10x them). Will mainstream users still chose a self-custodial wallet over making cheap payments in custodial services? Probably not. The same goes for wallet recovery. Unless we change something, the fear of losing their money will trump the fear of confiscation.

When things get hard, self-custodianship seems like something you can relegate, something you can live without. We had a sneak peek of this phenomenon happening with lightning early on. Even some of bitcoin’s most experienced users chose UX over self-custody for their lightning wallets. The thing with self-custody is that, much like human rights, you don’t realize you need it until it’s too late.

As Argentinians, we are painfully aware of what goes wrong when this happens. What others call ‘potential risk’ we call ‘history’. In an increasingly cashless world, the mere fact that you can have complete custody of your bitcoin changes everything.

We believe that with enough work, self-custodial bitcoin can have an even better UX than custodial services.

Muun 2.0

Back in October 2019, we launched Muun 1.0 with support for sending lightning payments. Since then, many people have started choosing Muun as their main bitcoin wallet while recommending it to their friends and family. We got a lot of feedback during this time, including things you love about Muun, things you would rather be different, and things you want to see happen. We heard you all.

Muun 2.0 is a complete rethinking of the wallet based on what we learned with Muun 1.0. It’s the result of many months of hard work, yet it feels just like the beginning of an exciting journey. We are psyched to share it with you, together with our fresh new website.

We hope you like it!

Visit our website: https://muun.com/