The Bitfury Group, a leading San Francisco-based “full service” cryptocurrency and blockchain technology development firm, is working with digital asset exchange, BTCBIT to “bring Lightning Network (LN) payments” to the Poland-based trading platform.
According to an official Bitfury-backed, Lightning Peach blog post, the LN integration could potentially “help more people use bitcoin in their everyday lives in a faster and more convenient way.” As explained in the blog post, the LN is a second-layer protocol that was initially created to solve bitcoin’s (BTC) scalability problem.
Litecoin’s (LTC) LN Adoption Growing Steadily
However, the Litecoin (LTC) network and other major digital currency platforms have also started to increasingly use various implementations of the LN protocol to expedite payments. 1ML.com, a website that tracks LN’s growth, shows that there are now 119 nodes supporting the layer-two payment solution for Litecoin.
These nodes have a total of 441 active channels, which is notably a 51% increase from the last month. Total capacity of Litecoin’s LN is currently at about 50 LTC, an amount presently valued at.around $1,590 – according to CryptoCompare data. In comparison to Litecoin, the Bitcoin network’s LN adoption rate is significantly slower as its capacity for payments conducted via the second-layer channel has only increased about 5% from the past month.
Handling Off-Chain Transactions With LN
But it’s also more difficult to maintain a high growth rate for LN payments on a network that has already become as large as Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. Total network capacity of Bitcoin’s LN channels is currently at 502.60 BTC, an amount valued at over $1.8 million. There are now 5,429 Bitcoin nodes running the LN protocol, with 21,344 active channels.
Explaining how the LN is designed to work, Lightning Peach’s blog notes:
The main idea behind the Lightning Network is that not all transactions are required to be recorded on a blockchain. Participants can create a payment channel between each other and record the channel’s opening on a blockchain.
An open LN channel can stay active for “any number of hours, days, weeks or decades”, and can only be closed when its participants decide to do so, Lightning Peach’s blog states. After an LN channel is closed, the details of all the transactions that took place between the different parties are registered on the blockchain.
MIT-Licensed BlueWallet Adds LN Support
“Creating a large network of these two-party channels, consumers can benefit from the security of using cryptocurrencies while also enjoying short transaction times comparable to using credit cards or other payment methods”, Lightning Peach’s blog explains.
As CryptoGlobe reported in late December 2018, the latest version of BlueWallet (for Android and iOS), a mobile bitcoin (BTC) wallet app, now supports the Lightning Network.
BlueWallet is an MIT-licensed, open-source Bitcoin wallet for smartphones that was developed by Nuno Coelho, a user-interface (UX) designer and product manager, and two other programmers Igor Korsakov (from London) and Marcos Rodriguez (from Atlanta).
