Bitcoin Startup Blockchain Releases Code for ‘Thunder’ Payment Channel Tech

By May 16, 2016Bitcoin Business

Bitcoin startup Blockchain has released the first version of a payments channel prototype that finds it moving its research efforts into how transactions on the bitcoin network can be made faster and more effective into the public eye.

The startup, which has raised $30m in one public round of funding, announced the alpha release of the ThunderNetwork today . Best described as a Blockchain -led effort into the implementation of payment channels, the technology seeks to allow bitcoin users a way to conduct off-blockchain transactions that settle against the bitcoin blockchain at a later date.

Given the sometimes high cost of settling against bitcoin’s blockchain, which can fluctuate ( sometimes greatly ) with demand for block space, the ecosystem has long sought to bridge bitcoin’s ability to be denominated into units as small as one one-hundred-millionth of a bitcoin with the fact that fees to settle such transactions against the blockchain are generally prohibitively higher than such values.

To date, the most prominent effort to bring payments channels to the bitcoin network has been the Bitcoin Lightning Network , an open-source project that has since coalesced into a startup called Lightning, which boasts some of the community’s more notable developers.

Still, Blockchain CEO Peter Smith sought to stress that the announcement represents a significant step forward for the bitcoin network given that the technology is useable at a limited scale today. Further, while spearheaded by Blockchain, he emphasized that ThunderNetwork can now be built on by the wider community of bitcoin developers.

Smith told CoinDesk: “Thunder is already open-sourced. It’s more functional today [than other versions of lightning networks], because it’s the first network of this style that’s settled back to the main blockchain.” In a demonstration of the network and its capabilities, Blockchain detailed how Smith and ThunderNetwork lead developer Mats Jerratsch tested […]

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