Progress on the bitcoin lightning network continues to advance. Following a promising trial of its routing network last week by French startup Acinq , Montreal-based Blockstream has announced that it has sent the first end-to-end transaction over the Lightning Network , a highly-anticipated top layer for the bitcoin network designed to boost transaction capacity. What the team called "Lightning’s first strike" saw its developers send a transaction across a test version of the network successfully to another party, a process that included invoicing that party for bitcoin and routing the payment through multiple nodes. Sent over the bitcoin testnet, the transaction of 0.01 test BTC was used to "sell" a picture of two cats sitting in front of a sunset composed of ASCII characters. While this may seem trivial, the announcement can be seen as a sign that Lightning is progressing from the concept stage toward implementation. To date, most of the implementations have focused on high-level items like routing and privacy, rather than offering an example of how Lightning might enhance bitcoin at scale. Blockstream core tech engineer Rusty Russell told CoinDesk: "We had all these pieces. That’s really exciting as a geek. In some ways, attaching them all together is trivial. In another way, it’s a real milestone to get to that point." Though not the company’s signature project, Blockstream has long been a contributor to the Lightning Network, as have several other startups. (There’s even one VC-backed firm called Lightning, launched last year). In particular, Russell has been working on an implementation of Lightning Network since March 2015. Likewise, Blockstream core tech engineer Christian Decker, who joined Blockstream in August , originally proposed Duplex Lightning Micropayment Channels , another way to tap micropayment channels for the same purpose: scaling bitcoin. Inside details But the Blockstream engineers […]
