Liana is a more advanced Bitcoin wallet.
It takes a little bit more thinking to set up the first time but is much more secure than other solutions. And it’s as easy to use as the best wallets out there.
For technical people:
Liana is a Miniscript wallet with focus on relative timelocks. Liana is Open Source, has reproducible and bootstrappable builds, and uses on-chain timelocks to not rely on any trusted party.
For everyone else:
Liana is a wallet that allows you to enable recovery methods, becoming active only after you stop using the wallet for a long time. Use this for backups, for inheritance planning, or in a company setting for employee rotation or conflict resolution. With no trusted third party you can control everything even if our company disappears. This is what we mean by “timelocks” in Liana: recovery options are locked unless you stop using the wallet for a while. We are not talking about locking your coins, but locking some keys. Your coins are always spendable by your main keys.
Other wallets typically offer you the choice of either:
- a single sig (only one key to spend)
- a multisig (typically 2 out of 3 keys to spend) configuration.
The multisig configuration offers a small redundancy, you can lose one of the keys and still be OK. But if you lose 2 keys, your funds are lost. For inheritance, it also doesn’t help: your heir will need access to 2 of the keys, which you don’t want them to have while you are alive. So a trusted third party is necessary: they should give the second key to your family only when you die. But you have to trust them to be there when needed, to be willing and able to give the key, and they could just not check that you are dead and give the key anyways. That’s a lot of trust!
Liana is different:
The recovery options are timelocked, using the Bitcoin blockchain itself. Nobody to trust, only that Bitcoin works. This is important, as some other wallets advertise using a timelock but aren’t using a Bitcoin timelock.
An example of how Liana can work is our Simple Inheritance template: you have one key, your beneficiary has another. This is not a multisig in the traditional sense. Only your key can spend at any time, but your beneficiary’s also become active once you stop using the wallet for 15 months. At this point, they can access the wallet (you still have access, in case you just missed the deadline and want to re-activate the timelock).
The other big use case of Liana is when used for security, in a multisig configuration. An example I often recommend is to have a 2-of-2 multisig, with 2 keys that you keep in 2 different locations, far from each other. This helps to be resilient against theft, including under physical threat. You cannot easily access the wallet, so threatening you won’t make it faster! I am saying 2-of-2, this is not a mistake. With Liana, you can use a strict, with no threshold, multisig without fear. In case you lose one -or even both- of these keys, why not setting up a single sig recovery option? Or if you want to keep multisig even for your recovery options you can use an expending multisig, adding more valid keys over time. It becomes a 2-of-3, a 2-of-4, etc. You can of course have completely different keys in the recovery options too, with different people contolling them. Your imagination is the limit.
In short, Liana lets you define your wallet more clearly.
What do you want your normal day-to-day experience to be like: single sig or multisig? If multisig, you can be strict with it and make it a 2-of-2 or 3-of-3. Then you can define recovery and/or inheritance options to protect you against loss. You don’t have to settle for a multisig that won’t cover your risks properly, just get Liana and get proper protection. Liana lets you have as many recovery options as you want, so you can have one or more recoveries, an inheritance, and maybe even a Safety Net.