With the release of version 6 of Liana, we added Blockstream Jade to the signing devices available to be used with our wallet. But this is not the only change that users will find in this new version: some significant improvements in the UX/UI and in the technical functioning were introduced, while at the same time preparing the ground for some big surprises that we have in mind for the near future.

Jade support

Competition in the hardware wallet market is crucial. Different producers offer unique solutions for key security, providing users with various options and reducing the risk of a single point of failure. This diversity is vital given the importance of their task. In Liana, with security being the base of our value proposition, we want to enhance the possibility for users to differentiate as much as they want among the plethora of hardware devices, especially because we want to give to as many users as we can access to the superpowers of Liana’s timelocks. Such superpowers, as everything good in life, don’t come for free: we need miniscript to be able to define and enforce more complex spending policies, and we need hardware wallets to support it as well in order to make them usable on Liana. That’s why we are thrilled that Blockstream Jade, one of the main hardware wallets on the market, has introduced miniscript in their 1.0.30 firmware version. This news represented the starting point for the main change brought by version 6 of Liana: the introduction of Jade support, which is now available for our users. You will now be able to set your Jade as part of your main spending set of keys and/or for the recovery one(s).

Shoutout to the Blockstream team for the effort and for the communication with us as we were implementing support for Jade.

Download the new version of Liana here and you are ready to go! Please feel free to reach out on our Discord and Telegram groups for feedback or support questions, we will be very happy to answer!

UX improvements: Network selection, Tx size estimation and more…

• Estimating the size of a transaction with multiple possible spending paths is not an easy task. In Liana we started conservative, by using the maximum possible value between all paths to avoid underestimating fees for our users. In version 6, we introduced better estimates for primary path expenditures.

• In version 6 of Liana, we improved the way the user can select the network for creating/using a wallet. Default is mainnet (i.e. the one with real bitcoins), but one can now more intuitively pick testnet, signet or regtest for testing purposes. We also introduced the possibility to get back to network selection in case you misclicked or changed your mind.

• One of the steps in setting up a Liana wallet is the registration of the wallet descriptor on the devices, so that they “associate” it in their memory. To align to what hardware wallets show, in the registration step we now display the descriptor differentiating between the policy and the different public keys to check, even if the security best practice of not relying on your laptop to check such information still applies.

• We introduced advanced text support: practically it means that you are finally free to add whatever emoji to labels and aliases inside your Liana wallet.

• Another more technical but still worth mentioning improvement was the bump of the iced (our rust GUI library) version to 0.12. This allows us to use a more recent graphic renderer wgpu which fixes some compatibility issues introduced recently.

For the full list of changes and fixes, you can see the changelog documentation on our main repository.

Conclusion

Supporting Jade is another big step towards the establishment of Liana as a standard in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This vision is why we are also focusing on improving our UX and thinking about different solutions to make it as smooth as possible to set up, which will be a big objective for the next releases (but no further spoilers!). If you want to keep updated on what we are doing and give feedback / get support, be sure to join our Discord and Telegram communities, while also keeping an eye on our Github repository. Liana is an open source project and contributions in code, thoughts or documentation are always more than welcome! Feel free to start inspecting the “Good First Issue"s list if you don’t know where to start.

We invite you to download and install Liana to try it out. For this purpose, you can also find a guide on our Github to quickly test it on Signet.