Aqua review

Pick Aqua if what you actually need is a way to hold and send dollars cheaply from a phone, with bitcoin alongside them. JAN3 built it for Latin America and says so on the front page, and the design follows from that: the wallet carries bitcoin on chain, the Liquid Network, Lightning, and Tether USDt both on Liquid and on several other chains. Aqua's own comparison puts a $100 USDt transfer over Liquid at three cents, against two dollars over Tron and eight over Ethereum, and network fees can be paid in USDt itself, so there is no separate gas token to buy first.

The tradeoff is what secures those balances. Liquid is a bitcoin sidechain run by a federation of functionaries, so Liquid bitcoin and Liquid USDt are backed by that federation rather than by bitcoin's own mining. That is a different trust assumption from an on-chain bitcoin balance, and it is the single thing to understand before you keep savings in the app. Lightning is reached through submarine swaps run by a third party rather than channels Aqua manages for you, and Aqua states that USDt transfers over Tron or Ethereum depend on SideShift's liquidity.

Custody itself is clean. Aqua says it does not store or access seed phrases: the 12 words are held on your device using Keychain on iOS or EncryptedSharedPreferences on Android, there are no documents to submit to open a wallet, and the company says it collects no personal data or transaction logs. Because it is non-custodial there are no wallet-imposed send or receive limits, transactions support replace-by-fee so a stuck payment can be bumped, and the client source is published on GitHub.

Two caveats for a new user. Buying bitcoin inside the app is handled by third-party providers, so any country restriction you hit there is theirs and not Aqua's, and Aqua's support answer is to take it up with the provider. And some of what the site advertises, a prepaid card and lending, is marked as coming rather than shipped, so choose the wallet on what it does today.