Developed by Breez in partnership with Bitcoin Spark, the Glow app lets users send stablecoins from their Bitcoin balance, while empowering developers to build better user experiences without having to worry about the difficult parts of building on top of Bitcoin. Breez’s SDK takes care of asset exchange in the background while supporting lightning payments through its Spark integration.
“Glow is a Bitcoin app for everyone,” said the company in a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. Users can access the app on both Apple and Android app stores. Glow re-invents the Bitcoin wallet experience, deviating from the seed phrase backup flow that many wallets attempt to introduce users to. Instead, Glow leverages the Passkey standard engineered and now encouraged by the Silicon Valley giants, which makes passwords and, in this case, pass phrases a thing of the past. Despite the change, Glow promises self-custody and cryptographic control over funds to its users, in an auditable software package.
As an MIT-licensed, free and open source progressive web app (PWA), Glow is built so that developers can look under the hood, take it apart, and implement features as they see fit, leveraging the Breez API and SDK. Besides the Passkey login, Glow has full support for native Lightning payments, sending and receiving with customizable Lightning addresses that look like emails, such as [email protected]. First deployed to a Bitcoiner user base, Glow can currently send USDT and USDC across most networks and blockchains through their partnership with Flashnet, drawing value from the user’s Bitcoin balance.
Glow comes integrated with a couple of onramps from the start as well. Users can onboard to bitcoin instantly via Cash App and MoonPay which the SDK connects to via their API. Sats arrive in seconds. The app also has contacts integration, letting users save their friends’ lightning addresses as a contact, hiding away ugly public keys and lightning invoices and delivering a more familiar and mainstream payments app experience.
Users can also avoid bitcoin’s volatility by swapping their BTC holdings to USD value at will and, according to the press release, they earn sats as they do. Glow’s stablecoin is USDB; the B stands for Bitcoin, a stablecoin issued by Brale Inc which is licensed as an MSB across over 45 states, and claims to be compliant with GENIUS Act standards: “Regulated & fully backed Issued by Brale, a U.S. regulated entity, and 100% backed by T-bills, cash, and cash equivalents”. There appears to be no way to verify Brale’s compliance with the GENIUS Act right now as the regulations are still being implemented and do not take effect until 2027.
What is remarkable about USDB is that it is a Bitcoin native stablecoin, deployed through the Spark protocol, which is compatible with the Lightning Network, essentially unlocking the stablecoin across Bitcoin rails. USDB holders earn up to 6% APY delivered from Flashnet DEFI exchange’s profits, according to a Spark announcement earlier this year.
Breez believes this combination of partnerships and technologies means that “Bitcoin has finally crossed a threshold.” The UX unlocked by Glow is now fully available to developers as a software development kit, something unimaginable by traditional finance.