MAGIC Grants Releases Monero Light-Wallet App for Android

MAGIC Grants announced today the release of their new, open-source Skylight Wallet app for Android, which will also be "available soon" for iOS and Desktop. Skylight Wallet is a Monero wallet which uses a Monero Light-Wallet Server (LWS) to detect your transactions, as opposed to traditional Monero wallets which require a lengthy synchronization period to scan the Monero blockchain to find your private transactions before you can use them.

This comes after one of the most popular existing light-wallet applications in the Monero cryptocurrency ecosystem, MyMonero, announced last month that they would be shutting down operations by January 2026.

Light-wallets work by sending your private Monero view key to an LWS, which scans the blockchain on your behalf and sends only transactions which are related to your wallet to your device. Offloading this processing to a centralized server is far more efficient, but your private view key does grant the server operator the ability to see all your transactions. It does not, however, grant any ability for the server operator to spend your funds.

MyMonero cited this privacy concern as a primary reason to shut down their service in their announcement in October. That application provided a default LWS for its users to make Monero adoption much quicker and more convenient, but they felt that their centralized model "requiring view keys [was] increasingly at odds with Monero's privacy evolution."

Skylight Wallet avoids this issue by not providing any LWS by default. Instead, they recommend running your own or using one that's run by a trusted friend or family member. This effectively allows you to offload computing power to a more powerful machine like your computer or NAS, but is more complex than a traditional wallet like the official Monero wallet or Cake Wallet.

MAGIC Grants cited the lack of "modern" Monero light-wallets as the reason for developing this app:

Monero LWS is not highly used. MyMonero used its own implementation, and there weren't many good ways to truly run your own LWS with a modern experience.

The self-hosted component means this will never be a suitable replacement for a traditional Monero wallet for everybody. However, there are many scenarios where a light-wallet will make sense for people, especially those who are juggling multiple devices, frequently restoring their wallets, or wish to provide a central LWS for their friends and community.

It's good to have a fully open-source and standardized implementation which isn't reliant on a centralized service provider, for those who appreciate the convenience or efficiency this offloaded design provides.

Skylight Wallet also comes with built-in Tor integration thanks to its use of Arti, a rewritten and more efficient version of the Tor codebase in Rust. You can read the full press release for the release of Skylight Wallet on MAGIC Grants' website.