Startup Lightning Labs Announces the First Lightning Mainnet Release
An “important milestone” was attained yesterday on March 15 in the development of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network scalability solution. California-based startup Lightning Labs made an official announcement of the first-ever mainnet release of its software called the Lightning Network Daemon (LND).
The LND is basically a developer-friendly software client that gives developers and easy access to the Lightning Network. The Lightning Network is currently one of the most sought-after developments in solving the scalability issues of the Bitcoin network.
The Lightning Network is a protocol often deemed as a second layer that is built atop the Bitcoin Network. The Lightning Network helps to exponentially boost the number and speed of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain by taking them off the blockchain without changing the block size. This allows for huge batches of instant, high-volume transactions being confirmed and then being subsequently shared on the Bitcoin blockchain.
With the latest development, the Lightning Labs has managed to raise $2.5 million in seed funding with investors showering heavy praise on the startup’s commitment to bring the project to life. The list of investors includes some eminent personalities from the tech industry like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, BitGo CTO Ben Davenport, former PayPal COO David Sacks, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev and others.
The project leads and the investors said that this is one of the most thoroughly tested versions of the Lightning tech, till date. Lightning Labs co-founder and CEO Elizabeth Stark said that this progress is “only truly developer friendly at this point.” She further hinted on developing a more friendlier interface down the road by saying “Like the early days of the internet, it will start with advanced users with command-line interfaces and then evolve into a much more usable experience.” Starks also said that by later this year, the startup is working on creating user-friendly Lightning-enabled wallets available on desktop and mobile platforms.
Other independent developers who are working on Lightning wallets and other applications see this progress as a considerable one giving a huge boost for further growth. Jack Mallers, who is developing a user-friendly Lightning wallet called Zap on top of LND said: “This release is a step forward for the network itself. What I mean by that is: Before all the apps, we need to build a healthy network that has liquidity, reliability, high-uptime nodes, healthy channels, etc. We need to onboard an entire industry onto a new layer and build a healthy topology. This release kind of marks the ‘start’ so to speak.”