Phoenix Wallet

Phoenix is a self-custodial mobile Bitcoin wallet built by ACINQ that uses the Lightning Network to send and receive payments. It runs a real Lightning node on the phone — only the user holds the keys — while hiding the operational complexity that normally comes with running Lightning. It is open source and available for Android and iOS.

Automated channel management

Phoenix removes the manual channel-opening that trips up many newcomers. Each user gets a single dynamic channel that grows and shrinks automatically using splicing, so balance management happens behind the scenes. ACINQ operates the Lightning Service Provider (LSP) that the wallet connects to for channel creation and inbound liquidity, charging fees for that service while never taking custody of funds.

Trampoline routing

Because a phone cannot easily hold the full network graph, Phoenix uses trampoline routing: instead of computing payment routes itself, it delegates route-finding to a well-connected node, sending the payment with instructions to deliver it to the destination. This saves bandwidth and battery. The trade-off is a privacy consideration — the trampoline node learns more about the payment than a fully self-routed node would — though multi-hop trampoline routes can mitigate this.

Phoenix is one of many self-custodial Lightning wallets, each with different trade-offs between convenience and privacy; we describe it neutrally. ACINQ also maintains the server side of this stack — see our entries on Eclair and Lightning Network.