• The Bitcoin based start-up, Lightning Labs, managed to raise $10 million in a funding round. The round was led by companies such as Craft Ventures and Ribbit Capital.
• Lightning Labs launched its first paid product, Lightning Loop, in its beta phase.

Elizabeth Stark, CEO and co-founder of the start-up Lightning Labs announced that they managed to raise $10 million in a round of funding. The round was led by investment firms Craft Ventures, Ribbit Capital, RRE, M13 and Slow.

Lightning Labs was founded 6 years ago by Start and Laolu Osuntokun also CTO of the start-up. The company focuses on facilitating sending and receiving money using Bitcoin’s second layer solution, the Lightning Network. The funds raised will be used to continue the development of this technology. Stark stated:

We at Lightning Labs see this as not an accomplishment in and of itself, but a means to achieving our goal of bringing instant bitcoin transactions to millions of people.

In addition, Lightning Labs announced the launch of its first paid product in its beta phase Lightning Loop. The product makes the use of the Lightning Network more efficient for all users who can move funds in a non-custodial manner:

Loop opens up a world of Lightning-native financial products, and this is the first of several “blue sky” Lightning products we’re building.

The first Lightning Labs product was launched two years ago on the Bitcoin mainnet and is called “Ind”. The Ind product, according to Stark, saw an explosion in growth and adoption. Ind has been integrated to more than 30 companies and has the support of more than 4,000 developers and testers. The Lightning Labs CEO also celebrated the fact that other companies using the Bitcoin Lightning Network have emerged in recent years and helped increase its use cases.

Finally, the CEO of Lightning Labs acknowledged the support they have received from the community and its partners. Lightning Labs’ successful cooperations have helped it ensure interoperability and increase the progress of the Lightning Network. Stark expressed enthusiasm for the future of the company and the development of the Lightning Network:

I can’t wait for the next decade of Lightning, as I know we’ll empower people to create things that we can’t even imagine today. We’re just at the beginning of building the internet of money, and it’s going to be a wild ride.

Driving the development of Bitcoin’s payment solutions

The Lightning Network was designed to solve the problem of scalability of the Bitcoin network. Since its creation, however, it has failed to achieve its goal. The payment solution is facing criticism as it is being questioned for its economic viability and the high degree of centralization of the network.

An MIT investigation proposed a routing solution that could boost and improve the performance of Lightning. The Spider solution was presented as a means to achieve high performance in payment network channels (PNC) and could be the future of scalability solutions like the Lightning Network and Ethereum’s Raiden.

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