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Electrum has announced the release of the new version of the famous Bitcoin wallet with support for Lightning Network (LN).
The new version will be the 4.0, with the last one available to date being the 3.3.8, and will be launched this week, although they didn’t say on which day.
In addition to LN, it will also support PSBT, watchtower and Submarine Swaps.
About the integration of LN, the official GitHub repository says it will be hosted on Electrum servers, but users will also be allowed to use other servers.
In addition, for LN wallets that remain offline for a long time, it is recommended to set up a watchtower.
Since the funds stored in an LN channel cannot be restored from the seed, it will be possible to create static backups of a channel, although these cannot be used to perform transactions, rather to only remotely activate forced closures of the channel.
These backups can also be exported, for example via QR code, and imported into other instances of the wallet.
The new version 4.0 will contain other new features, but the most anticipated one is definitely the Lightning Network, as Electrum is one of the most used Bitcoin wallets in the world. The possibility to use LN channels for immediate and cheap BTC transactions could be very appreciated by those who use Electrum to make transactions of small amounts, and with a certain continuity.
The announcement of the integration of LN in the new version of the wallet was made in October of last year, and since then there has not been much news about it.
Therefore, it is plausible that the developers of Electrum have been working on it for a long time, in the hope that the result will be safe and easy to use even for users who are not particularly experienced.