How it works
Liana is a desktop Bitcoin wallet written in Rust and released under the BSD-3-Clause licence. It ships as two cooperating components: a lianad daemon that exposes a JSON-RPC interface, and an Iced-based GUI for Windows, macOS and Linux. The wallet talks to the Bitcoin network through a backend the user picks themselves — a local Bitcoin Core node, an Electrum server, or an Esplora instance.
The novelty is the spending policy. Instead of a single signing key, Liana builds a miniscript descriptor with a primary path that signs immediately and one or more recovery paths that only become valid after an on-chain inactivity window — three months, a year, whatever you set. The timelocks are enforced by the Bitcoin network itself, not by Wizardsardine; once funds sit at a Liana address, no operator can move them in either direction.
That same construction supports an "expanding" or "decaying" multisig — a 2-of-3 today that simplifies into a single-key recovery after the timeout — which Wizardsardine documents as a safer alternative to a static 2-of-3 inheritance scheme.
KYC & privacy
There is nothing to KYC. Liana is software you download; no account, no email, no operator-side identity, and the binaries are buildable from the GitHub source. The wallet does not ship with telemetry. Network-layer privacy is whatever your chosen backend gives you: pointing Liana at your own Bitcoin Core node is the strongest option, while public Electrum or Esplora servers will see the addresses you query.
A separate web variant at lianalite.com exists with its own threat model and is out of scope here — this review concerns the self-hosted desktop wallet only.
Strengths and limits
The miniscript engineering is the real story. Antoine Poinsot, Liana's lead author, is a Bitcoin Core maintainer and one of the people who pushed miniscript through to production. That pedigree shows in the descriptor handling, the PSBT flow, and the hardware-signer integration — Ledger, Coldcard, BitBox and Blockstream Jade all work without monkey-patching. Version 14, shipped in April 2026, simplified onboarding and trimmed the cognitive load of building decaying multisig setups, which had been the main friction in earlier releases.
The limits are equally clear. There is no Lightning, no coin-control workflow on the level of Sparrow, and no mobile build. The codebase has not had a publicly released third-party security audit at the time of writing; review pressure comes from the Bitcoin Core community around its author rather than from a named firm. The GitHub repository sits at roughly 436 stars and the user base is correspondingly modest — Liana is battle-tested by its maintainers' standing, not by millions of installs.
Verdict
Liana occupies a narrow but important slot: a self-custodial Bitcoin wallet whose distinguishing feature is correctness around timelocked recovery, written by people who actually ship the underlying protocol. It is the right tool for users who want inheritance or recovery encoded in the script itself, not bolted on as a service. Grade: A- (8.6/10). Trust: TRUSTED.
Liana is the rare self-custody wallet where timelocked recovery is a first-class primitive, not an afterthought. The Bitcoin Core lineage shows in the descriptor handling and hardware-signer support, even if the user base remains small. Grade: A- (8.6/10). Trust: TRUSTED.
