What Lightening Network Would Look Like in 2019?

In the previous 30 days, the quantity of lightning payment channels has expanded by around 36 percent and hence making a total reach about 22,000 channels. Active lightning nodes have gone up more than 16 percent so far, and at present, it holds 5,690 distributed nodes.

The layer-2 payments system is effectively sustained and developed by a team of developers located out of across the world. The technology was introduced for the first time in beta last year. These incorporate Eclair, c-lightning, Lightning Network Daemon (LND), ptarmigan, and Rust-Lightning along with Lit by MIT. Even apart from these six, there are about six more out there, said Pierre-Marie Padiou, CEO of Acinq.

Emphasizing on the facts that the codebase for developing the lightning network’s users is open-source and is accessible to everybody, he said. He also added that around 30 or so odd updates to the network were decided by developers during a summit a year ago.

After the summit, the companies will keep on formalizing the work as per the decisions were taken during the summit, and execute them so they can be deployed, said one core tech developer. Since November  2018, one part of the network has been revealed by CTO of Lightning Labs. This would allow the system to make a payment to the desired destination without requiring a receipt (at the beginning itself).

Clarifying that every group of users/clients has their very own most liked features of the network, he also said that more changes and updates to the system would be revealed with time. All things considered, lightning developers are hoping the best about the consistent success of the LN (so far), and they are expecting development trends seen last year to keep on going in the present year too.

Padiou said that the company has been witnessing huge activity since a couple of months and are certain that this pattern will amplify in 2019. As per one dedicated blockchain website, the amount of bitcoin transacted by using lightning channels since June (2018) has jumped up (from hardly 25 BTC to 578 BTC).

Decker revealed that the key behind building up an active and well-connected community along with developing and enhancing lightning would descend to its potential to change how we make payments (in future). Undoubtedly, the prime use case of the lightning network as depicted on the official website page seems to be lightning-quick blockchain payments without worrying about the confirmation time from the block.

Transactions done by utilizing the lightning networks takes seconds to finish, this is opposite to the time taken by other systems (9 or so minutes). And it is knowing that payments for products and projects made by utilizing both debit and credit card are made with most developed economies without breaking a sweat.

Facing and dealing with limitations on the operations of conventional banking services is a usual issue for the common population across the world. As per a world map which is showing public LN spread across the globe, the more significant part of the servers functioning on the lightning network is more centered in North America and Europe.

Padiou disclosed that while bitcoin’s development community has truly been more grounded in North America and Europe, the nodes being shown on the world map did not demonstrate the number of mobile clients for lightning (who might be more uniformly scattered).

He said he thinks the language barrier is usually considered little of, and activities like Reading Bitcoin which give translations to Chinese, Japanese and Korean are exceptionally worthy.

From Decker’s perspective, the map of open lightning channels coordinates pretty intimately with the map of Internet users, which is not unexpected since those are the locations that are well aware of bitcoin, hold some bitcoins, and are testing the product. Since March 2018, the LN has witnessed the number of new payment routes develop from around 1,500 channels to more than 20,000.

So far the developers of the lightning network do not have any certain numeric targets to reach before the year-end, however, as there is a list of features aimed at extending network ability expected for taking off in months to come.

Which means, the foundation of Lightning Technology (BOLT 1.0) is a typical, open-source resource of code that contains all the essential technical necessities or particulars for users to take an interest in the lightning network. Not to be mistaken for BOLT – a lightning-motivated zcash execution of the network launched in August.

Addressing all the foreseen changes to the BOLT storehouse, Padiou emphasized that they didn’t need to change important, low-level design choices. It’s uplifting news since they could have committed enormous errors and could have needed to begin once again; however, it’s not the situation.

Through the perspective of the agenda of improvements set for 2019, the need, at that point, in Padiou’s mind, is reliability in the entirety of its aspects to energize continued adoption of the technology. A payment system requires working simply. It has worth if it enables you to send and get money when you require it, Padiou said.

Roxanne Williams

Roxanne Williams has recently joined as a market reporter for CryptoNewsZ - the 24/7 crypto news site, where she produces recent stories, technical analysis and price updates on world's leading cryptocurrencies.

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