Your first Lightning payment: Phoenix or Aqua

After this lesson you can: send and receive Lightning payments from keys you hold, and explain why the first receive cost more than the rest.

Two worked examples

Phoenix (by ACINQ) is a self-custodial Lightning wallet that manages channels for you: there is nothing to open, and its backup is a 12-word seed plus an encrypted channel backup it keeps on your behalf. When it needs more capacity it opens or resizes a channel and charges a fee it shows you first. Aqua (by JAN3) is a self-custodial wallet for on-chain, Liquid and Lightning; Lightning payments run through swaps rather than your own channels, so there is no channel to think about. Either is fine for this lesson; the keys are yours in both.

Steps

1. 01Install from the official store listing linked from phoenix.acinq.co or aquawallet.io. Write the seed words on paper, numbered. No screenshots.
2. 02Fund it. Tap Receive. Phoenix shows a Lightning invoice and, under "on-chain", a bitcoin address; Aqua lets you pick the layer. From your exchange, choose a Lightning withdrawal if it offers one (instant, tiny fee) or send a few dollars on-chain (slower, a mining fee).
3. 03Watch the first receive. On Phoenix the first inbound payment may show a fee: the wallet opened a channel to give you capacity, and that costs an on-chain transaction. It shows the fee and asks before taking it. Later receives into the same channel are nearly free.
4. 04Pay an invoice. Find any Lightning invoice (a friend, a tip page, a test invoice from a service) or scan a QR starting lnbc. The amount is fixed by the invoice. Confirm. It settles in seconds.
5. 05Pay a Lightning address. Type an address that looks like name@domain. Enter an amount. Send. Lightning addresses are reusable; invoices are one-time.
6. 06Receive by address. In the wallet, find your own Lightning address (Phoenix offers one; Aqua shows a reusable invoice). Give it to someone and watch sats arrive with no invoice exchange.
7. 07Back up and test. Delete and restore from the words on a spare phone before you keep more than coffee money in it. Phoenix also needs its channel backup; the app explains where it lives.

What you learned by doing it

The invoice is a request; the address is a reusable request; the channel is the pipe; the first fee was the pipe being laid. Everything in the next lesson, liquidity, is about that pipe.