Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy Working to Onboard Huge Crowd to Bitcoin Lightning Network

Bitcoin evangelist Michael Saylor and his business intelligence firm MicroStrategy is undertaking a new project to spearhead the adoption of Bitcoin. Speaking at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia, on Saturday, September 3, the MicroStrategy executive chairman said that the company’s developers are working on a solution to onboard a large number of people onto the Lightning Network.

The Lightning Network is the Layer-2 scalability platform for Bitcoin to facilitate faster and cheaper transactions. Mr. Saylor has been a big advocate of Lightning and thus has undertaken work in this regard.

Speaking to the audience via a video call, Saylor called Bitcoin as “the most important thing going on in the world in technology”. He further added: “MicroStrategy has got some R&D projects going on right now where we’re working on enterprise applications of Lightning: enterprise Lightning wallet, enterprise Lightning servers, enterprise authentication”.

MicroStrategy is looking to play the big game by building solutions that would allow companies to “roll out Lightning to a hundred thousand employees every day” or “open Lightning wallets for 10 million customers overnight.”

However, this is quite the early stage of the project and remains to be seen what viable solutions come out of it. As said, Saylor has been one of the biggest proponents of the Lightning protocol and has expressed his confidence in the technology.

The MicroStrategy chief added: “The advantage of Lightning is not just that you could scale up bitcoin for billions of people, or drive the transaction cost to nearly nothing, but also, the ethos of bitcoin is to go very carefully and not move fast on the base layer without the universal consensus, but in Lightning, you can move much more aggressively developing functionality and take more risks with the applications than you can with the underlying bitcoin layer”.

The Bitcoin Lightning Network will allow users to open multiple payment channels and exchange transactions before settling them on-chain. It helps to minimize fees and confirmation time which has been a major issue for the Bitcoin blockchain.

Interestingly, the announcement comes along with the New York Digital Investments Group (NYDIG) announcing the launch of a Lightning accelerator, during the BitBlockBoom conference in Texas last month.

As of writing this story, the Bitcoin price continues to trade under pressure. As of press time, BTC is trading just under $20,000 levels.