Nayuta is a non-custodial Lightning wallet. Or rather: it was. Because the wallet is closing – with a somewhat bitter farewell.
In essence, Nayuta did everything as it should. The Lightning wallet is largely open source, it allows users to manage Payment Channels themselves, but assists them with a service node.
Most users who tested Nayuta were quite impressed. One said that it „makes more sense than custodial bank accounts like Wallet of Satoshi“ and is „superior to wallets like Phoenix.“ The website Wallet Scrutiny also gave Nayuta a fairly good review.
However, Nayuta was still in the beta version, apparently developed by just one developer, and had so few users that you can hardly find a review. This will not change now either.
Because Nayuta recently announced that they will shut down the wallet in December 2024. The blog cites two reasons: First, CEO Kurimoto has health issues that require a lot of time for treatments. Second, the Lightning landscape has evolved. It was „originally developed for real-time transactions with decentralized money, but has since evolved into a business landscape where custodial solutions are taking the lead.“ Nayuta was on its way to changing its strategy towards such a solution but couldn’t implement it due to the CEO’s health problems.
Nayuta is a small wallet, a one- or two-man project with few users and essentially no source of income. It is bold to infer the state of Lightning from this, but Kurimoto’s explanation, conveyed very politely and without blame, is quite significant: The strategy of developing a non-custodial wallet seems to have failed; it is so difficult, if not impossible, to make Lightning user-friendly without custody that even a project that began ideally couldn’t help but also become custodial.
Lightning seems to be as incompatible with Bitcoin’s most important ideal, self-custody, as Linux is with computer games. Those who manage to run blockbuster games on Linux are probably also capable of using a non-custodial Lightning wallet. The rest of the world, however, uses Windows and custodial solutions, or directly PayPal.
Nayuta will shut down its node in three months, in December 2024. The Bitcoins of the users will remain in the app since Nayuta is non-custodial, but it will no longer be possible to transfer them. Probably because Nayuta uses a similar structure to Phoenix, where users manage their keys themselves but exclusively open channels with a master node of the wallet.
Therefore, Nayuta recommends its users to transfer the Bitcoins or close the channels altogether. When the node is shut down, there is apparently a „forced close“: The Bitcoins return to the blockchain, at fees that are hard to calculate. If the channels have less money than the fees, the coins in them become immovable. Hence, Kurimoto recommends taking action beforehand.