Understanding Liquid-to-Liquid Lightning transactions

You may have noticed that when you use AQUA to scan a Lightning invoice from certain wallets, including other AQUA wallets, the Lightning transaction automatically changes to become a Liquid transaction.

This is because AQUA automatically detects when the other Lightning wallet is using a Boltz atomic swap, and settles the payment directly on Liquid to save you fees and unnecessary swaps.

Why does AQUA do this?

If AQUA sent these invoices over the Lightning Network, AQUA would first swap Liquid → Lightning, and then the receiving wallet/service would swap Lightning → Liquid on their side. That’s two swaps.

To avoid the extra swaps and fees, AQUA settles the transaction directly on Liquid instead.

What this means for you

• Transactions are still fast and reliable.
• They appear in your wallet history as L-BTC transactions.
• Fees are lower because no extra swap is needed.

In short: Lightning payments between AQUA and wallets or services that use Boltz are automatically optimized to settle on Liquid.