The Next Frontiers of Lightning: Taproot Assets, Nostr, and AI, Oh My! ⚡️🥕🤖

Jun 12, 2023

Welcome to the latest edition of the Lightning Lab 🧪, a newsletter filled with Lightning Network updates, community coverage, and, of course, memes! In this issue, we discuss the next frontiers Lightning Network builders are exploring: the new Taproot Asset Protocol release, infusing Lightning payments into nostr, and giving AI agents Lightning wallets for machine-to-machine payments!

The global financial system is under an enormous amount of stress today. Those of us focused on building a new, parallel financial system are optimistic, however, because today is also the best time to start building on bitcoin and Lightning. The developer tooling and documentation has never been more extensive, the infrastructure has never been more robust, and the opportunity set has never been more appealing. Bitcoiners are building the foundation for a new, fairer, and more inclusive financial system as the old one crumbles before our eyes, the time to jump in and help us build is now!

The Next Frontiers of Lightning ⚡️

A few weeks ago, we shipped the latest release of the Taproot Assets Protocol daemon (formerly Taro). Taproot Assets v0.2 provides the core set of features for developers looking to issue, send, receive, and discover assets on the bitcoin blockchain, currently on testnet with mainnet support coming soon. This core set of developer features consists of these flagship items:

📝 Sending and receiving with novel Virtual Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (vPSBTs)

🌌 Discovering and publishing assets with the initial Universe APIs

🍀 Maximum chain-space efficiency with multi-asset mints, sends, and receives

🔐 Stability and scalability improvements

We are incredibly excited to get this release into the hands of the bitcoin developer community, and to start building out this new ecosystem together! The first half of 2023 has demonstrated the latent demand from developers for issuing assets on the bitcoin blockchain, just using less efficient protocols (whose creators have even suggested that Taproot Assets “is unequivocally a better solution”). Taproot Assets provides the community with a more scalable way forward that will interoperate with the existing Lightning Network, letting developers leverage its existing network effects and install base of wallets, exchanges, and merchants, instead of needing to bootstrap a new ecosystem from scratch.

Immediately after launch, we traveled to Bitcoin Miami 2023 and heard a massive amount of demand for the new features from existing Lightning companies, bitcoin sidechain developers, and even builders brand new to the bitcoin community excited about the new possibilities. CEO Elizabeth Stark educated builders about why now is the time for bitcoin on the main stage at the conference, and about the importance of building with scalable protocols!

Last week, the community momentum continued to build as over 100 developers joined us in a Taproot Asset Community Call! We discussed all the developer resources that were launched alongside the new release like support for the new protocol in Polar v2, the popular rapid prototyping tool for Lightning application developers from Senior Lead Frontend Engineer Jamal James, and our Tap into the Universe demo video. We laid out the roadmap to mainnet support for the new protocol, and then turned it over to the developer community to tell us what they were working on: stablecoins, web wallets, explorers, rewards-as-a-service, and much much more.

We’ll have much more to share on this front in subsequent issues as the developer community starts shipping new products. In the meantime, CTO Laolu Osuntokun has been busy cooking up an entirely new possibility for developers looking to leverage the global reach, instant settlement, and low fees of Lightning Network payments: the Lightning <> AI convergence, with AI4All.

News & Updates

Lightning Launches

Microstrategy, the public data analytics company, hosted the first ever Lightning for Corporations event, a watershed moment for the Lightning community! Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark was a keynote speaker, joining Microstrategy CEO Michael Saylor on a fireside chat to discuss the promise of Lightning and how the many Fortune 500 companies in attendance can utilize LN applications for everyday business needs.

Microstrategy also unveiled their first Lightning product at the event, a corporate rewards app using satoshi micropayments to help incentivize employee activity.

Voltage launched a partnership with Google Cloud, making it easier than ever to spin up a Lightning node for global, instantly settling, low fee bitcoin payments. Businesses of the world need to be asking themselves: What’s your Lightning strategy?? Because adoption is happening fast!

River, a U.S. Bitcoin and Lightning technology and financial services startup, announced a $35 million series B funding round led by Kingsway Capital. Their River Lightning Services (RLS) product is one of the easiest and most reliable ways for businesses to get onboarded to Lightning, we love to see it!

Fedi, a U.S. based developer of community-empowering financial and data technology, raised a $17.1M Series A led by Ego Death Capital. They’re making it easier for communities around the world to run federations sharing the responsibility around custody and payments infrastructure for their circular economies, starting with the alpha release of their mobile app!

Azteco raised a $6M seed funding round led by Jack Dorsey. Azteco is growing and recently announced they’re live in Mexico with over 45k locations, Colombia with 52,000 locations, Peru with 90,000 locations and in Brazil with 126,000 locations, selling Bitcoin/Lightning vouchers for cash.

Amboss raised $4M in a seed funding round led by Stillmark for their enterprise-grade LN data analytics platform.

Ripio, the Latin American exchange, announced they’ve integrated Lightning. Their primarily emerging market users from Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, and Mexico can now leverage Lightning’s global reach, instant settlement, and low fees.

Lightspark, the Lightning infrastructure provider led by David Marcus, former cryptocurrency head at Meta and president at Paypal, launched their first products: Lightspark Connect, enterprise-grade automated node infrastructure for Lightning payments; Lightspark Predict for smart routing & just-in-time liquidity deployment; Lightspark SDKs and API for businesses integrating Lightning (and another SDK specific for wallets). They also released a demo of a Lightning-enabled Chrome wallet extension to showcase their SDK.

Xapo, a Bitcoin private bank, announced they’ve integrated Lightning through a partnership with Lightspark.

Rain, Bitcoin exchange in the Middle East, Turkey, and Pakistan, integrated Lightning Network deposits and withdrawals, using Lightspark’s infrastructure. Who’s next?

Relai, the Switzerland DCA app, raised $4.5M and has Lightning integration on their roadmap for 2023.

Trammell Venture Partners, to round out this list of funding announcements, published a research report on the bitcoin-native startup ecosystem’s early growth. This chart in particular caught our attention, showing the disparity between VC dollars invested in crypto vs. bitcoin. We expect the pendulum to swing the other way as the next frontiers of Lightning continue to be explored. 😎

Lightning Stats

⚡ Many Lightning apps had All-Time-High after All-Time-High during the past few months. Geyser helped hundreds of projects stack a record 309M sats ($80k) in May, which marks their fifth consecutive monthly ATH in sats supported. Wallet of Satoshi is processing over 30k LN payments per day, a big jump from the first couple months of 2023, and nearly reaching 1M LN payments/month. LN Markets had a monthly trading volume All-Time-High in March at 1,850 BTC ($48M), as did Robosats who is averaging nearly 1 BTC ($26k) of P2P Lightning trading volume/day.
👾 THNDR Games users make around 10,000 LN payments every day, with 64% going to Wallet of Satoshi, 20% to Muun, 9% to ZEBEDEE, 3.5% to Pouch, and 3% to other wallets. They set an all-time high in March with 300,000+ LN payments, surpassing their previous record in February by 50%! Usage in the Philippines spiked ~10x in the last 6-12 months and represented ~6% of THNDR payments in April.
🌩 CoinCorner users are now sending more payments through Lightning than on-chain. 53% of Bitcoin sends from CoinCorner were sent via the Lightning Network.
⛏ Fumb Games is doing more than 10k Lightning transactions a day in their Lightning-powered game, Bitcoin Miner, which surpassed the milestone of 1M downloads, becoming the biggest mobile Play-and-Earn game by user count.
🌋 OKX shared some stats showing users in El Salvador making almost 40% of their Lightning transactions. Users in Vietnam account for around 3%, and countries like Thailand, Argentina, and Brazil between 2-3%.
🔬 PlebLab’s PlebDev course was sold to 357 developers across 44 countries, speaking 13 languages.
🌟 Amboss announced that more than 7,000 Lightning nodes have been claimed on their platform since their launch.
🎧 Value 4 Value podcasts have earned at least 48M sats ($12.5k) from Feb 10th to Mar 10th. That’s a 21% increase from the previous 30 days.
💫 Damus, the popular nostr client, was approved by the App Store and had about 146k downloads by Feb 4th, only three days after debuting in the store. 10M sats ($2.6k) were zapped, the nostr term for tips over Lightning, to the creator’s profile (William Casarin) in just one day. In total, he has received nearly 12k zaps totaling 49M sats ($13k) and made 1.3k Lightning payments (mostly zaps) totaling 20M ($5.2k) sats. Nostr 🤝 Lightning.

Lightning Ecosystem

🇨🇿 Fedi launched their first ever Pop-Up Federation at BTC Prague. Participants at the event were able to test mainnet payments with the Fedi app and share their feedback.
🐺 Wolf’s first cohort in their Lightning accelerator program, Wolfpack 1, consisted of eight teams and 23 founders from 10 countries, who presented their ideas last month during a demo day. Interested startups and founders can apply for their Wolfpack 3 today, applications due July 28th!
🇲🇽 Ibex announced one of Mexico’s largest internet providers, Total Play (part of Group Salinas), has integrated Bitcoin Lightning payments.
🇨🇭 Crypto Convert announced their CryptoQR Lightning payments solution is now active at all Pick-n-Pay stores across South Africa.
🚢 Voltage is on fire, we can barely keep up with all the shipping! They’re offering fully managed Lightning nodes for enterprises, released Flow 2.0 on testnet, a new LSP focused on just-in-time liquidity, announced their Nostr Toolkit, which enables non-custodial Zaps and Lightning Addresses for any Lightning node, and last but not least, Voltage nodes now support litd, which allows their customers to use Loop, Pool, Faraday, Lightning Node Connect, and Terminal. Check the great tutorial they’ve made showcasing all the powerful things users and developers can do with Terminal and LNC.
☎ Machankura, the Bitcoin USSD service in Africa, went live in Ghana. Vladimir Fomene published an article on Forbes about Machankura and Africans using Bitcoin without internet access and Coinbase interviewed their founder Kgothatso Ngako on how Bitcoin is helping increase economic freedom in Africa.
🏇 Mash has been busy! They launched a mobile wallet. They also launched Ghost Checkout, which allows users to pay/donate without creating an account, with any Lightning wallet, to any site that has integrated Mash. Additionally, they introduced Page Revealers, which allows creators to charge for a single page in their websites. Finally, they shipped polls & crowd-races with sats, allowing events, podcasts, and more to gather opinions from audiences literally voting with their wallets.
🌍 ZEBEDEE turned its main application ZBD into a Nostr client, bringing their users to the open, global, decentralized, and interoperable social network built on the protocol. They also opened up their API, released a brand new documentation portal, and announced a Node.js SDK for the API. Additionally, their wallet hopped on the Send Globally trend by working with fiat on/off ramp partners Bitnob for Africa and Pouch for the Philippines.
🇻🇳 Neutronpay, a Vietnam based Lightning app, released their app in Canada and partnered with DitoBanx for cross-border remittances to El Salvador, Pouch to send money to the Philippines, and Bitnob for Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana. They’ve also released their enterprise infrastructure API for businesses in Asia and North America to leverage the benefits of the Lightning Network.
🐝 Alby joined Zeus and added Lightning Node Connect support! With LNC, users can seamlessly connect their Alby wallet directly to their Lightning nodes and even create custodial accounts for their family members. Additionally, they announced a partnership with Blubrry, a leading podcasting platform for hosting, distribution, audience statistics, monetization, and other tools podcasters need. On the listener side, Alby partnered with Castamatic, and with Podcast Guru, two podcast player apps.
🎳 Strike can now Send Globally to the Philippines through a partnership with Pouch, to Vietnam through a partnership with Getbit, to Guatemala using Osmo Wallet to off ramp to Guatemalan Quetzal, and more. They are now launching their wallet in 65+ countries. On the technical side, they made their sending API documentation public and integrated LNURL and Lightning Addresses.
💹 Abubakar Nur Khalil wrote about the Naira Crisis and how it’s fueling Bitcoin adoption in Nigeria, with applications like Bitnob and Machankura enabling Lightning-fast remittances between the US and Africa. And MacKenzie Sigalos wrote a profile for CNBC on some of the great entrepreneurs boosting Bitcoin adoption in Africa.
🦢 Swan is working on integrating Lightning withdrawals, currently in alpha test.
🧱 The Wall, a Lightning node operator, had its best month ever in terms of number of forwards, volume, and profit, and attributes the success to nostr and Autofees on Terminal.
🐻‍❄️ Polar v2.0.0, the popular rapid prototyping tool for Lightning application developers, is out with support for the Taproot Assets Protocol!
🇿🇦 Switzerland 🧡 Lightning! In addition to Relai’s plans mentioned above, Mt Pelerin, a financial services provider in Switzerland, just integrated the Lightning Network, and Swiss Bitcoin Pay released a new Lightning point-of-sale and NFC card.
🏧 BitcoinATM.com demo new Lightning-powered ATMs at Bitcoin Miami 2023 using their GenesisCoin software integrated with OpenNode. GenesisCoin is the software powering Chivo, Athena, and CoinCloud ATMs, huge news!
🖥 Blockware Solutions announced they have integrated LN payments into their ASIC secondary marketplace, through a partnership with Voltage.
♾ Coinfinity, an exchange from Austria, announced their Lightning integration. The exchanges are coming!
🍀 Clover, a point-of-sale platform owned by the payments giant Fiserv, launched their Lightning integration public pilot through a partnership with Strike.
⚖️ Scaling Lightning is a new testing toolkit for the Lightning Network protocol, implementations, and applications. The tool will generate one or more Lightning Nodes using Helm and Kubernetes connected to a public signet or a private regtest, allowing developers, researchers, and node operators to test and validate their products/assumptions.
🔦 Blixt also released Lightning Address support with “Lightning Box,” becoming the first self-custodial LN wallet to add support for the human-readable address protocol.
📭 Lightning Addresses are becoming ubiquitous in Lightning apps, particularly with the growing popularity of nostr and zaps. Tallycoin now allows their users to setup their own Zap-enabled Lightning addresses connected directly to their nodes. River implemented LNURL into their wallet, along with pay-to-Lightning-Address support. Swiss Bitcoin Pay added Lightning Address support for automatic payouts. MicroStrategy converted all their corporate e-mail addresses into Lightning addresses.
😜 Blink is the new name for the Bitcoin Beach Wallet after a complete rebranding. Looking good!
✅ Vida, Podfans and Blink, along with several other wallets and services, implemented NIP-57 support to their wallets, allowing their users to send and receive nostr zaps directly from their existing Lightning Address-enabled wallets.
⛲ Fountain is now using Zebedee as their Lightning infrastructure provider. As part of the partnership, users will earn sats for any podcast they listen to on Fountain. They’ve also integrated Zaps into their app, so users just need to add their nostr NIP-05 to their profile to start receiving Zaps. Their latest big update includes new features like transcripts and live podcasts.
⚡ Zaps on nostr are incredibly popular. LightningTipBot saw a surge of usage with their Lightning Address service after they added support for Zaps. Users are zapping each other all the time and having a lot of fun. Zaplife lets you watch Zaps going through on nostr in real time. Lightning tipping ftw!
💻 Ligess is a Lightning Address and Zap server for users willing to host their own Lightning Addresses connected to their nodes.
💊 Zion launched v2 of their social media app built on LN and DIDs (decentralized identifiers) and their encrypted DMs now support sending and receiving Lightning payments.
🦘 Wallet of Satoshi released their Point of Sale feature to all their users, and shared a sneak peek of Lightning Address contacts list and custom WoS LN Address.
➕ Lightning Network+ introduced Watch Swaps, with which node runners cooperate to watch each other's nodes with their watchtower services.
🎁 Lightsats, the Lightning pre-coiner onramp, implemented automatic refunds of expired tips, using Lightning Address.
⛱ Umbrel introduced advanced settings in their new Lightning Node app update. Users can now set routing fees, optimize their routing strategy, add watchtowers, and more. They’ve also introduced a Nostr Relay app, that will allow anyone to run their own private nostr relay.

💰 André Neves wrote a guide explaining how to setup a paid nostr relay using the Nostream relay implementation connected to the ZBD API. Relays like nostr.milou.lol, lightningrelay.com and eden.nostr.land are currently charging a one-time fee in sats for users connecting to their relay services, while Kollider’s Nostr Relay is experimenting with a subscription-based paid relay, all on Lightning of course.
𓅦 Nostr development has been so hot that it is difficult to keep up with all the new products. A few of the “social media” nostr clients out there include Snort, Iris, Coracle, Primal, Damus, Plebstr, Nostros, Amethyst. Social Media with a Lightning incentivization model is the first nostr killer-app, but there are many other cool things being built, including other Bitcoin products using nostr as a communication layer.

📰 Stacker News released a new feature that allows users to offer bounties for specific tasks/jobs.
🥋 Channel Ninja is a new tool that recommends which channels a Lightning node should open.
👁 Bolt Observer open-sourced their LiquidOps tool for Lightning node management and alerting, after adding several new alerts: on-chain funds levels, sync to graph, and sync to chain.
🕸 The Bitcoin Company released the web version of their app to buy prepaid Visa cards and gift cards.
🌐 Walletano is a new web-based app that provides both a custodial wallet experience and a self-custodial one, by allowing users to connect their LND nodes. They just released an open-source script that allows company owners to transform corporate email addresses into Lightning addresses, like MicroStrategy did!
💥 Kollider released their browser-based Lightning wallet with USD and EUR swaps to the general public, introduced the Kollider Karma, a rewards point system, and added a search function so their users can find friends via nostr and Lightning Address.
🔒 Amboss added nostr pubkeys and Magma offers to users profile pages, and added new pricing tiers to their premium services. They also announced the launch of LINER (Lightning Network Rate), an index that demonstrates low risk yield for enterprise bitcoin holders.
⛴ Noah announced a partnership with Bitrefill, integrating Bitrefill’s widget to their app.
🏛 LN Capital released automatic fee management and automatic channel tagging through their node management software Torq.
🖋 Scrib is a service for enabling Lightning paywalls on Ghost websites. Developed by the TFTC team, they currently support integrating BTCPayserver, OpenNode, and LN Addresses. The plan is to support more LN payment providers and other CMS platforms.
🐻 Happy Bear made a successful Balance of Satoshis group open, with 6 channels being open in one transaction.
🔙 Satsback is now live in Ireland. They now have thousands of local partners in 15 countries, and global online shops available for everyone.
🥊 Pouch users can now cash out to physical cash at all the major remittance centers in the Philippines.
🗓 ZapPlanner is a showcase introducing push payments to simulate subscription payments, using Nostr Wallet Connect and Alby’s SDK.
💨 Breez released a new version with Tor support, Neutrino sync over http, and more.
🔧 Zaprite rebuilt its platform from the ground up, migrating to a new database, new checkout experience, a Teams feature, redesigned invoice generation, and more. They integrated the IbexPay API to their Bitcoin invoicing/accounting platform.
📊 Mempool released v2.5.0 of their open-source software, adding to their self-hosted instances a few of the features that they’ve released on mempool.space over the past few months, including the Lightning explorer.
🎙 Coinshax is a new Lightning-enabled platform for podcast management.
🎥 StreamSats is a new service by an African developer that allows streamers to easily give away sats during their streams.
💼 Gigsats launched a Lightning-powered freelance marketplace.
🏖 Bitcoinize is a new Lightning Point of Sale machine built by the team behind Praia Bitcoin in Jericoacoara, now distributing from El Salvador. Built for Bitcoin circular economies!
🏆 Oshi released a Bitcoin loyalty and rewards plugin for Shopify.
📚 Emeralize published a new course on Lightning Network Product Primitives (Invoice, LNURL, Lightning Address) and released their first workshops in partnership with PlebLab. Creators can now split sales earnings with other Emeralize users, using Lightning Address. And users are getting paid for learning through a partnership with ZEBEDEE.
🧩 LNbits now has a plugin for Lightning Prisms, which are Lightning Address value split workflows, ideated by Kukks and implemented by Bitkarrot. They also announced 3 new extensions for Nostr Marketplaces. Last but not least, they’re now hosting LNbits instances for users, with options to pay in sats per hour.
🌊 Geyser announced project discovery and personal feed, and added nostr login + badges on their platform.
🎤 Podfans released a new design for their admin console that will allow podcasters to see listen time, percent complete, sats earned per episode, and more.
🔊 Bitcoin for Fairness (Anita Posch’s org) in partnership with Alby started a podcast hosting website, BTC Podcasting, that aims to enable Bitcoiners to host Bitcoin-only podcasts in their local languages to foster communities on the ground and spread Bitcoin self-custody education.
💳 Bolt Card (the open source project, not Coincorner’s card) announced their mobile wallet, a BlueWallet fork.
👥 Machankura released a new feature adding the ability for feature phone users to send and receive Bitcoin as a group. Each group is now able to create a “clan” and establish rules on how many clan members need to sign a transaction.
🎲 THNDR Games announced a new game, Bitcoin Blocks, a mashup of Tetris and Sudoku. They also added the ability for users to connect their nostr npub to their THNDR IDs so they can display their Leagues badges.
🐸 pnkfrg studios announced PLA!GO, a new Lightning-powered social game for mobile users.
🕹 New Lightning-powered games are popping up every day! Hellfire Arena, a new shooter game, eRepublic, an MMO that lets you stack bitcoin rewards by participating in weekly events, and a Mahjong version with bitcoin rewards by Bear Hug Games, are all using ZEBEDEE’s infrastructure. Other games include SatoshiGoal, a new game combining football and Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, Liberty Land, yet another Minecraft server with a Lightning economy, Chain Duel, revamp of the classic snake game where two chains duel for the next block reward.
🎮 MandelDuck is hacking on Super Mario 3 with “Pay to Play” and “Play to Earn” Lightning integrations. Sonic is next. These games will be part of Bit-tendo, a free retro game bitcoin infuser for bars, conferences, meetups, etc.
🎓 Sebastian Alscher published his master thesis about the price of anarchy on the Lightning Network.
🎶 Wavlake announced Wavman, an open-source music player built for nostr.
🟠 Satoshi is a new app for buying, selling, earning, sending, spending, and borrowing Bitcoin. Lightning from day one as it should be. The app is currently in beta and people can join a waitlist to get pre-release details.
🔋 Satimoto released Strom, a FOSS Lightning/nostr enabled OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) bridge, allowing home/private electric vehicle charge point owners to accept LN payments for charging sessions.
🏗️ Nathaniel Whittemore announced The Breakdown is expanding and the first spinoff is Bitcoin Builders, a show focused on the building happening on Bitcoin and Lightning.
🤝 Qala announced a strategic partnership with Nodl and Bolt Observer to support Qala’s fellows with the Lightning node infrastructure and management tools they need for their projects.
✖ LightX is a new custodial Bitcoin and Lightning wallet, that just launched their V2 app on Google Play.
🌍 Africa Free Routing launched a blog “Lightning Network in Africa”, where they’ll share insights and updates on LN adoption in the region.
👩‍🎓 El Salvador launched an university education program to train Bitcoin and Lightning developers.
📱 BTCPay Server now supports Lightning NFC payments without the need for plugins.
📝 Notebin, a pastebin-like app for notes over nostr, integrated Lightning tipping.
😮‍💨 Blixt 0.6.5 was released with the ability to set maximum LN fee for a payment, ability to change lnd log level, and bug fixes. Blixt 0.6.6 has been released, with lnd 0.16 and support for bimodal pathfinding, along with some UX improvements. Blixt 0.6.7 was released with lnd 0.16.2 and some other minor improvements.
🔮 Zeus version 0.7.2 implemented NFC receiving. Zeus v0.7.3 allows users to import QR code images from gallery, has biometrics login, and more. Zeus v0.7.4 adds fee bumping, channel sorting/filtering, default invoice settings, 23 new fiat currencies and 6 new themes. Zeus v0.7.5 is now available with a new camera, a new payment path view, handling of in-flight payments, 5 new currencies, and more. Version 0.7.6 includes support for writing notes on transactions, LN payments, and invoices, along with POS updates and other improvements. Wow… these devs can’t stop shipping!
🗞 Toheeb Ojuolape, a Qala fellow, wrote a great article about Atomic Multipath Payments.
👨‍💻 Numerous hackathons have taken place over the last several months: NostrHack from Bolt.Fun, Wolf, and Nostr Design, Pleb.fi Miami, the MIT Bitcoin Expo hackathon, and the SATSx Hackathon in Austin. Highlights include Auntie LN, that connects Lightning nodes to nostr, facilitating effective communication among nodes; Celebrity Escrow, a tool to easily facilitate escrow setups using nostr; Remintooor, a tool to remint collections of assets on the Taproot Assets Protocol; and many more!

The Lightning <> AI Convergence ⚡️🤖

Earlier this month, CTO Laolu Osuntokun, Fedi Head of Developer and Product Support Kody Low, and Craft Ventures COO and Lightning Labs Board Member Brian Murray teamed up to win 2nd place in the Craft AI Hackathon (though we all know they were the people’s champ!). Their project, AI4All, demonstrated how the popular ChatbotUI application (built by Mckay Wrigley, above) could be enhanced with Lightning payments to broaden access to a global market of users, instead of restricting it to just those with a US bank account. They even went a step further and built an autonomous agent empowered with a Lightning wallet to purchase compute cycles to actually execute the ChatbotUI user’s instructions, taking advantage of the L402 protocol to natively embed Lightning payments within HTTP. Clearly, Mckay was Lightning-pilled by the demo, there’s much more to come on this front!

Replit provides developers with a web-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a code collaboration platform, and cloud provider support, which has helped them grow to over 22M developers on their platform. CEO Amjad Masad has long been a supporter of bitcoin and Lightning, especially because his users are predominantly a global, young, digitally native developer audience, and his developer platform company has made itself a major hub for AI development. We’re very excited to see these two communities continue to converge, as CEO Elizabeth Stark’s vision for the Lightning Network has always been to enable “payments use cases that were previously impossible” like the automated machine-to-machine payments in AI4ALL, or Nostr zaps.

The broader Lightning community has also hopped on this trend, with Deezy CEO Danny Diekroger releasing WebAI, an npm package that helps developers accept LN payments while building on OpenAI’s tools, Voltage VP Engineering Justin Litchfield building LNChat, a tool for Lightning node management and debugging using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, and Oliver Offing building ChatZAP, an accountless LLM service with Lightning payments. Lightning Labs Infrastructure Engineer Jordi Montes even wrote about his vision for the Lightning <> AI Convergence, coining the term Independent Digital Agents (IDAs):

People will interact with IDAs in a similar way that a CEO interacts with strategic directives to the various departments within a company. Just as a CEO doesn't micromanage every operation, but sets high-level objectives and budget restrictions on the department, users will soon issue [those] broad directives [themselves]… I envision a vibrant economy inhabited by millions of IDAs. Much like human society, these agents will specialize, trade, and, at times, opt to purchase computational services from others instead of self-executing tasks.

If this vision of the world comes true, would it even be possible for IDAs to get a bank account? Would Visa and Mastercard be able to support their transactions? Would IDAs, and their developers, want to deal with chargebacks and fraud, or would they prefer settling with a bearer asset that makes that type of fraud obsolete? Jordi argues that they would use a native digital currency, and therefore internet-native payment rails instead:

The need for a native digital currency is paramount, and no option embodies this concept better than Bitcoin/LN. This symbiosis between AI and Bitcoin is the match made in heaven, ready to usher us into the next phase of digital evolution. As we steer towards this future, we anticipate a steep surge in Bitcoin users - and many of them may not be humans.
In this future, I see an economy bustling with Independent Digital Agents (IDAs) actively buying and selling their services and computational power.

What an exciting and provocative vision! Natively digital intelligence, natively digital markets, natively digital money and payments. The pairing of the fastest growing asset of all time, bitcoin, with the fastest growing product of all time, ChatGPT. This convergence simultaneously seems too good to be true, while making all the sense in the world. Previous attempts at machine-to-machine payments were more focused on an Internet of Things vision that never really got traction at scale. In contrast, AI products like ChatGPT and Midjourney have gone mainstream more rapidly than anybody expected, their traction is undeniable. As the market for these AI services continues to grow, it seems inevitable that the market participants will turn to bitcoin and Lightning for payments services. The good news is: we’re ready for them. ⚡️

Lightning Labs News

Product

Over the past few months, we’ve released updates for our entire product stack from LND to Taproot Assets to Terminal. First, we shipped the latest release of the Taproot Assets Protocol daemon, providing the core set of features for developers looking to issue, send, receive, and discover assets on the bitcoin blockchain. Next, we released lnd 0.16.3, which includes the major updates from v0.16 like more pathfinding flexibility, watchtower fixes, and SQLite database optionality along with fixes for increased security in higher fee environments. Further, the loopd v0.24.1 release made Autoloop easier to use whereby developers can simply set a target for their hot wallet size and provide a recurring budget, allowing for true set and forget liquidity management. In addition, Lightning Terminal now includes Autofees, an easy-to-use automatic channel routing fee management solution.

Media

CEO Elizabeth Stark was a keynote speaker at Microstrategy’s Lightning for Corporations event, speaking on a fireside chat with Michael Saylor on the promise of Lightning. She also sat down with Thai Bitcoin evangelist Piriya at Lightningcon Vietnam to talk about the Lightning Network as the global payments layer, accessible from anywhere in the world. And at Bitcoin 2023, she discussed building Lightning-native companies on a panel moderated by MacKenzie Sigalos with Miles Suter from Cash App and David Marcus from Lightspark.

Director of Business Development Ryan Gentry moderated a panel at the same Microstrategy Lightning for Corporations event with Graham Krizek, Voltage CEO, Nick Slaney, C= Lead, and Roy Sheinfeld, Breez CEO, on the infrastructure being built for Lightning and how it works under the hood. Additionally, he spoke at Consensus Lightning-pilling their broader blockchain audience, explaining how Lightning works, its traction and giving an overview on future developments.

Head of Lightning Liquidity Alex Bosworth and Developer Advocate Hannah Rosenberg spoke on a panel at Bitcoin 2023 focused on building Lightning applications with Conor Okus from Spiral, moderated by Joe Hall from Coindesk.

Technical Writer Leo Weese gave a great talk at Lightningcon Vietnam on the usability of Lightning, from his perspective as a power user, and discussed some of Lightning’s UX problems alongside their potential solutions.

Hiring

Are you a security engineer with experience in securing web, Bitcoin, and other public-facing network services, penetration testing, and both automated and manual source code security reviews? We are hiring for a Security Enginee r!

Other roles include:

Lightning Infrastructure Engineer, Senior Engineering Manager, Cryptographic Protocol Engineer

Join us in making magic internet money a reality! 🧙‍♂️

Want to get involved? Join the LND Developer Community on Slack.

Meams

Thanks for reading!

The Lightning Lab

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