Best Free Aqua Wallet Alternative for Lightning
On August 3, 2026, JAN3 announced that Lightning functionality in Aqua Wallet is temporarily unavailable:
If you reach for Aqua when you need to pay a Lightning invoice, that button is not going to work today. Rizful is a free, no-KYC place to send and receive Lightning while JAN3 sorts this out.
What Is and Is Not Affected​
Read this part carefully, because Aqua is not down — only the Lightning piece is. Straight from JAN3's announcement:
Currently unavailable:
- Lightning send and receive in Aqua
- AgenticAQUA
- The SamRock Protocol integration with BTCPay Server
Still fully operational:
- On-chain Bitcoin transactions
- Liquid transactions
- BTC and USDT swaps within Aqua
JAN3 says they are actively working on solutions and will keep users updated.
Aqua is a self-custodial wallet. Your on-chain BTC, L-BTC, and USDT-Liquid are still yours, still in the wallet, and still spendable through the routes listed above. This is a broken feature, not a broken wallet. Do not go sweeping your seed anywhere in a panic.
Why This Happened​
Aqua paid Lightning invoices by doing an internal swap through Boltz. When you pasted a BOLT11 invoice into Aqua, your L-BTC or on-chain BTC was swapped to Lightning behind the scenes. On August 3, 2026, Boltz disabled its swap services indefinitely after months of AI-assisted attacks on its infrastructure — and every wallet that leaned on Boltz for its Lightning leg lost that leg at the same moment.
That is worth understanding rather than being annoyed about. Aqua's design was reasonable: use a specialist, non-custodial swap provider instead of running Lightning channels yourself. It just turns out that a shared dependency is a shared dependency.
We should say plainly: we like Aqua, and JAN3 is a serious, trusted Bitcoin company. Aqua is a genuinely good self-custodial wallet, JAN3 disclosed the problem within hours instead of letting users hit a mystery error, and they were specific about exactly what still works. We expect Lightning to come back, whether Boltz returns or JAN3 routes around it. Keep Aqua installed.
In the meantime, you still need to pay invoices.
Why Rizful Works as a Stand-In​
Rizful runs its own Lightning node infrastructure. There is no third-party swap provider in the path for Lightning send and receive, so this particular outage does not touch it.
- Send and receive Lightning — pay any BOLT11 invoice, or get paid to a permanent
@rizful.comLightning Address - No KYC — sign up at rizful.com, using a temporary or anonymous email address if you prefer
- Free account — no subscription, no minimum balance
- Nothing to install — it runs in a browser on phone, tablet, or desktop, and you can add it to your home screen like an app
- On-chain in and out — send BTC in and it becomes available on Lightning; send it back out on-chain whenever you want
- Reusable QR code — a scannable code for receiving, no expiration
How To Bridge From Aqua To Lightning Right Now​
Aqua's on-chain sending still works, which is all you need:
- Sign up for a free account at rizful.com
- In Rizful, tap the stacked coins icon and choose Receive On-Chain, then Generate New Address
- In Aqua, send on-chain BTC to that address
- Wait for confirmation — roughly 10 minutes
- Your balance is now spendable on Lightning from Rizful
The step-by-step version with screenshots is in How to Swap On-Chain Funds To Lightning. When Aqua's Lightning comes back, you can send from Rizful to an on-chain address and move right back.
Send a small test amount first. Always.
This route pays a miner fee that Aqua's internal swap did not. For paying a single small invoice, it may be cheaper to look at the other ways to pay a Lightning invoice. If you expect to be paying invoices for a while, moving a working balance across once and spending it over Lightning is the cheaper shape.
If You Are a Merchant Using SamRock​
The SamRock Protocol integration with BTCPay Server is affected too, so merchants who were collecting Lightning through that path are currently collecting nothing over Lightning.
Rizful can receive Lightning payments programmatically over NWC and tell your app the moment an invoice settles. Start with Best Free BTCPay Server Alternative for the overview, or go straight to Accept Bitcoin Payments on Your Website or App for the integration checklist and code. If you would rather keep BTCPay Server itself and just swap the Lightning backend, Rizful works with BTCPay Server directly.
Merchants who were using the Boltz BTCPay plugin are in the same boat — see Best Free Boltz BTCPay Plugin Alternative for the two-minute switch.
TLDR​
Aqua is a good wallet built by a good team having a bad week through no fault of its own. Keep it installed, and use Rizful for the Lightning gap in the meantime.