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"The Lightning Network is the next evolutionary step of Bitcoin. Bitcoin enables global transactions without intermediaries, but settling all payments via the Bitcoin Blockchain has limitations. Lightning can significantly increase payment throughput, which is necessary for Bitcoin to be widely used as a payment system. With Lightning, small payments can be made at a fraction of the cost, laying the foundation for an entire micropayment economy. We will discuss how exactly the Lightning Network works in detail in the second part of our article series."

etonec has published a Bitcoin Lightning network explainer. Although Bitcoin enables global transactions without intermediaries, settling all payments via the Bitcoin blockchain has limitations. Lightning can significantly increase payment throughput. Also the possibility to send other assets, such as stablecoins, via the Lightning network, might positively impact its development.

The paper "Lightning Network: a second path towards centralisation of the Bitcoin economy" (by researchers Jian-Hong Lin, Kevin Primicerio, Tiziano Squartini, Christian Decker and Claudio J. Tessone) concludes that lightning has an "unequal wealth distribution" with a smaller percentage of nodes on the network gradually accumulating a larger proportion of bitcoin (BTC).

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem computer scientists Jona Harris and Aviv Zohar have taken a closer look at a "systemic" Lightning Network attack that could lead to loss of funds. The attack, which they describe in their new paper, "Flood & Loot: A Systemic Attack on the Lightning Network," preys on Bitcoin blockchain congestion.

The Kraken exchange will add support for the Lightning Network in 2021, which adds it to a small (but growing) list of exchanges that support the scaling technology thus far. Kraken is hiring a team to manage the feature, which it anticipates will be open for client use sometime in the first half of 2021. Bitcoin's Lightning Network allows its users to send bitcoin faster and more cheaply than if they were using Bitcoin's primary network. These transactions use bitcoin but take place on a "secondary network" with different rules for accounting payments than Bitcoin's blockchain (these transactions are eventually settled and recorded on Bitcoin's blockchain when a user is done using the network).

"Much literature and media content has been wildly polarizing when it comes to discussion around the Lightning Network. It is either characterized as a perfect product ready to fix all of Bitcoin's scaling problems or as a terrible idea that would best be set aside for some other coin to act as peer-to-peer cash. Reality lies somewhere between, and our report covers a range of topics from Lightning metrics that can be analyzed to vulnerabilities that developers are working on."

"The preceding articles in this series cover the basics of the Lightning Network and industrial use cases of Bitcoin Lightning. In this article, we focus on retail use cases for the end user. We will present use cases around payments in retail, hospitality, e-commerce, as well as donations, cross-border payments, streaming payments, and financial inclusion."

In the last part of its series on the Lightning Network, etonec takes a look at the status quo of the network in charts, statistics, and visualizations using publicly available data. What started as an interconnection of a few nodes has evolved from a small network to a global network for value exchange. An increasing number of Lightning Nodes are being put into operation, which are better connected with one-another every day through payment channels. Away from hobbyists and early adopters, the first companies are latching onto the network - whether from the user side or the infrastructure side.

Bitcoin spenders can now use the lightning network to shop at e-commerce sites like Amazon. Crypto payment processing startup Moon has announced that any lightning-enabled wallet can now also be used through Moon's browser extension.

BTC's Lightning Network is overly-complex, prone to failures, and creates legal problems for its users. That's the conclusion of a review recently published by Unbounded Capital in an article titled "Why the Lightning Network Doesn't Work." The transactions layer, designed to "solve" BTC's self-inflicted scaling problems, fails at its main purpose and isn't even necessary, according to authors Joshua Henslee and Zach Resnick.

These participants work together to make Lightning Network transactions fast, cheap, and secure. The Lightning Network allows for much faster and less expensive transactions compared to traditional Bitcoin transactions, which is especially important for small transactions that would otherwise be uneconomical due to the fee incentives on the Bitcoin network.

A new routing proposal is expected to be merged today into the official "specifications" of lightning, the technology many advocates trumpet as the fix to bitcoin's long-standing payment problems.

United States-based payments startup Fold has made Lightning Network (LN) payments possible at Amazon, Starbucks, Uber and other big name retailers. The news was revealed in an official blog post published on July 10.

The Lightning Network is being developed as a means of making bitcoin payments faster, cheaper, and more private. It's still experimental and reckless to use for large amounts of money. The goal of this page is to provide an index of curated high quality educational resources and information about the network to make it easier to educate yourself.

"It's all about the Lightning Network in Bitcoin land. This decentralized micropayments system unlocked Bitcoin's scalability problem and unleashed the possibility of hyperbitcoinization into the world. Not only that, since this Layer 2 solution was created with the Bitcoin ethos in mind, it offers similar security guarantees. It all runs over the Bitcoin blockchain, even though it only touches it for final settlement."

Lightning Labs is launching the Taro protocol, a technology that will route digital assets through the Lightning network - a payments platform built on top of bitcoin's base layer that enables global, high volume, virtually instantaneous, and low-fee transactions on the bitcoin blockchain. However, the project is still in development mode.

"Lightning Labs raised a Series B funding round, led by Valor Equity Partners and global asset manager Baillie Gifford, both early backers of Tesla and SpaceX. Among other high-profile investors are Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, NYDIG and Silvergate CEO Alan Lane. This follows on a $10 million Series A in 2020, following an even earlier investment by Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey. Stark declined to disclose the firm's post-money valuation."

Stock and cryptocurrency trading app Robinhood is making plans to add the Bitcoin Lightning Network to its platform for speedier Bitcoin transactions. It also shared that eligible users from its beta crypto waitlist can now send and receive crypto through its crypto wallet feature. Robinhood currently offers trading in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Litecoin, Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin SV, with adding crypto deposits and withdrawals being the next natural step the company is taking into crypto.

"Bitcoin is a "Money Over Internet Protocol," as is Ethereum, potentially. Just as VOIP moves voice data around the internet natively, Bitcoin and Ethereum move value data around the internet natively. Most people disparage Bitcoin, Ethereum, et al. as protocols that can't scale and can't possibly threaten the incumbent financial industry, just as they denigrated VOIP. But the scaling technology is now here - it's called the Lightning Network, which is a Bitcoin layer 2 protocol. Its throughput capacity roughly equals that of Visa, and payments made over Lightning cost virtually zero. There are other scaling technologies, too. If I'm right and scaling technologies for internet-native money protocols have arrived, then many legacy systems operating in the financial system today will be obsolete within a handful of years." (Caitlin Long)

The Cleveland Fed published an assessment of the relationship between Lightning Network (LN) adoption and reduced blockchain congestion, suggesting that the LN has improved the efficiency of bitcoin as a means of payment. It found that the improvement cannot be explained by other factors, such as changes in demand or the adoption of Segregated Witness (SegWit) (a change to the bitcoin transaction format activated on August 23, 2017 that improves the efficiency of blockchain storage. The paper found mixed evidence on whether increased LN centralization has improved its efficiency.