Nimiq’s Front-End team is excited to announce Bitcoin integration in the Nimiq Wallet, now live in the Testnet!
To test it out, you can get testnet Bitcoin (tBTC) from faucets. Simply search for “Bitcoin testnet faucet” in your favorite search engine.
How To Get It
Bitcoin will be automatically enabled for all newly created accounts and also when you log in with your existing multi-address account (legacy accounts do not support Bitcoin).
If you are already logged in to your account in the Testnet, you will get a popup the first time you open the Wallet and can simply click “Activate Bitcoin” to enable Bitcoin support for your account(s).
About Nimiq’s Bitcoin Integration
No New Account or Recovery Words Required
Nimiq Wallet’s Bitcoin integration uses the same (modern) account you already have (same underlying private key). No need to create a new account and write down new recovery words. Simply enable Bitcoin for your existing account and your Bitcoin balance and transaction history will show up below your current Nimiq addresses. The total balance shown for your account will include your Bitcoin balance, and you can now see the relation between your Nimiq and Bitcoin holdings in a little graph (we call it the “balance distribution graph”) below your total balance.
Single-Use Addresses
In Bitcoin, different from Nimiq, addresses are generally considered to be single-use. This means that your address is not your identity, and you should use a different address for each payment you receive, be it from other people, exchanges, mining pools, etc. This also means that Nimiq Wallet supports only one BTC transaction history per account.
Native SegWit Addresses
Nimiq Wallet exclusively supports Bitcoin’s modern Native SegWit addresses (bc1…), which have the lowest fees and are the most future-proof of the three Bitcoin address types. All relevant services in the Bitcoin ecosystem should support this modern address type.
Bitcoin Network Connection
The Nimiq Wallet uses the open and free-to-use Electrum network to provide a Bitcoin network connection. Electrum servers are provided by various Bitcoin-related businesses and block explorers. In the testnet, the Wallet currently only connects to Blockstream’s testnet Electrum server. Blockstream says they are keeping no logs.
While currently only connecting to a single server, we plan to extend our Bitcoin support with a basic type of consensus between multiple Electrum servers in the future.
We might add an option to connect to custom Electrum servers in the future, based on community feedback.
Current Limitations
Some features are not yet ready, but we plan to release them before Bitcoin support goes to the mainnet:
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NIM-BTC Atomic Swaps
Swaps between NIM and BTC are not yet ready, but we are working hard on it to provide the best user experience the crypto-world has seen for real non-custodial cross-chain atomic swaps! -
Hub Checkout with Bitcoin Accounts
The Nimiq Checkout allows payments in NIM, BTC, and ETH. As we integrate BTC into the Nimiq Wallet, we want to also allow users to pay with their Wallet Bitcoin accounts in the Checkout. -
Ledger Hardware Wallet Support
Adding support for the Ledger Bitcoin app proved to be more time-intensive than we anticipated, so Ledger accounts are not yet supporting Bitcoin in the Nimiq Wallet.
Feedback
When you have any feedback, be it ideas, suggestions, bugs, unexpected behavior, please post here in this thread, thank you!
Have fun managing your Bitcoin in Nimiq Wallet!
