In 2015, a proposal for the Lightning Network described a caching layer for Bitcoin, where simple payment channels could support off-chain transactions, which would decrease fees, increase speed, improve scalability, and further decentralizing Bitcoin transactions. Following SegWit’s malleability fix for Bitcoin, the implementers of the Lightning Network protocol have announced an exciting milestone today: the first release candidate of version 1.0 of the Lightning protocol specification.
This is the capstone of a year spent standardizing the implementations created by the three teams working on the Lightning Network—ACINQ, Blockstream, and Lightning Labs—with input from other members of the Bitcoin community. Recently the teams verified our interoperability, which is crucial to the creation of a single, unified Lightning Network where payments are seamlessly routed. To do so, we collaborated to conduct the world’s first mainnet Lightning transactions using all three Lightning implementations.
Learn more about the tests and this milestone in the joint announcement by the developers of eclair (ACINQ), c-lightning (Blockstream), and lnd (Lightning Labs), and provide your feedback and peer review on the Lightning release candidate specification.