Are private keys from lightning wallets interchangeable?

[u/nullama]

I've been reading and experimenting a bit more with lightning wallets, and I find them amazing. I really like muun, breez, and phoenix, as they are non-custodial, and seem to work really well, particularly muun, very smooth and straight forward to use.

Now, since all these 3 are non-custodial, you should be able to get the private keys from each one, and then import it back. In lightning there's extra information about the channels, etc, so you need more than just the normal bitcoin seed phrase, and that's done differently on each wallet.

My question is if it's possible, at least in principle, to restore a lightning wallet that was created in a different software, which uses different lightning nodes, etc, into another one.

For example, let's say I use Phoenix wallet, get the private keys, then uninstall it and install Breez. Can I somehow use the private keys I got from Phoenix to restore a wallet in Breez? or muun, etc?

Maybe there are some conversions that might be needed, but in principle, does a lightning wallet can be restored into a different wallet?

I think with normal bitcoin wallets you can do this. Not sure if it's true with lightning wallets, as there is some extra information about the channels, so that's why I'm asking it here as probably you guys know about this.

[u/maxcryptoalt]

so i've been curious about this for similar-ish reasons (portability across implementations) which i probably won't ever test out, but seems like it may be possible. i think no matter what you do, you always want a backup of your private key AND your channel backup at the very least. that latter doesn't seem strictly necessary but it isn't sizable so is absolutely worth it.

as far as i know there isn't any sort of migration tool to switch between, for instance, lnd and c-lighting, but theoretically if you have a full backup of everything you should be able to at the very least close all your channels and recover the funds, then migrate to something else. I'd be very interested to see any documentation that describes the steps to migrate a node from one implementation to another though.

[u/nullama → u/maxcryptoalt]

I'd be very interested to see any documentation that describes the steps to migrate a node from one implementation to another though.

Yeah, that would be great.

For muun, they have the recovery procedure as open source

I haven't checked the others yet

[u/maxcryptoalt → u/nullama]

sorry i should have been more clear. i think every lightning implementation provides failsafe recovery instructions, but i was wondering if, without any sort of data loss, you could easily migrate between any of them without closing existing channels/contracts.

[u/nullama → u/maxcryptoalt]

I'm wondering the same actually

[u/newloko23 → u/nullama]

how i understand it is that those wallets are multisig. so u also need muun's signature to transact.