February 27, 2024
We are excited to offer a complete overhaul of the Voltage user interface, along with many new additions, changes, and features. Our primary goal with this release is to make the entire interface easier to understand and navigate as well as provide the best experience for developers and businesses looking to deploy bitcoin or the Lightning Network for their products or services.
Included in this release are improvements for organizations to be able to share access with other members of their teams to improve efficiency and security. We have also changed how we charge for our services, which is detailed in the Billing category in this document.
There are many more changes outlined below. We hope you enjoy the latest version of Voltage!
What’s New:
Teams
- Collaborate with others on your Voltage Team. The Team owner is able to invite others to collaborate on the Team. Owners are able to define specified permissions to different members of the Team.
- For example, invite your accountant to your team and grant permissions for read-only access so they can monitor the finances of the infrastructure or invite your operations manager to oversee the billing state of the account.
Voltage Interface
- Rebuilt the Dashboard UI so that all tools and products are presented on a single home dashboard page.
- Visual UI improvements to alert users after any node restarts ensure the most reliable uptime.
- Several features have been added or moved to your node’s home dashboard for easier access, including:
- Total balance of your node
- Applications (ThunderHub, LNBits, etc.)
- Activate Surge analytics
- Settings pages are presented in an easier-to-understand category system so you can quickly and easily find the setting you want to change.
- Lightning Node Connect(LNC) pairing phrases now have a dedicated page to make it easier to find and manage.
- Macaroon Bakery is a new interface feature that allows you to generate, find, and manage all Macaroon permission tokens.
- Seed Phrase has an improved UI that hides and warns you of how sensitive the information is before displaying it on screen. After the seed is displayed, it will ask you to reaffirm it to ensure it was recorded correctly.
- Voltage and LND logs have been merged, and filters added.
- Neutrino (Lite) nodes will no longer be available on Voltage. Existing Lite nodes will continue to run with a migration planned later.
Billing
The Voltage Billing system has been completely overhauled and the pricing model has been adjusted.
- Billing is handled per Team
- You have the choice of four Team plans with each one providing more Compute and API credits.
- Compute Credits are spent on infrastucture. For example the Starter plan includes 2 compute credits, which you can use to deploy a single standard LND node.
- Your Voltage infrastructure auto scales; you will be billed for extra Compute Credits, API Credits, or Team Members as you grow your team and your infrastructure.
- If you pay your bill with Bitcoin, you will now see a unified QR scheme that can be scanned by both Bitcoin on-chain and lightning wallets.
- I added WebLN Support so you can pay your voltage bill with a lightning browser extension such as Alby if desired.
Surge
- Surge analytics is no longer accessed on a separate page. You can now manage your Surge service and see your node analytics all from the same dashboard.
The Voltage team is excited to release what we have worked so hard on over the past year. We couldn’t have done it without all of the generous feedback from you, our users, and our supporters. Your support has been integral to the improvements we are developing, and we genuinely appreciate every one of you. Thank you so much for using Voltage!
