By
Steve Muchoki
April 24th, 2024
Similar to the Olympic Flame, the Lightning Torch has gained considerable publicity since it began in January, involving the likes of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Blockstream CEO Adam Back.
The Lightning torch has obviously found themselves a new home. The torch, which has been passed to both an octogenarian and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in the past, has been passed to both Fidelity Investments and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman in the last few days.
Upon receiving the torch, Fidelity assets tweeted:
“We and our research team at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology have received the #LNTorch from @Wiz. Who should we pass it to? “
Reid Hoffman thanked with the tweet:
Thanks for the Lightning Torch. ⚡️🔥 Great to see Lightning accelerating Bitcoin use cases and adoption. Next invoice for 0.037 BTC. #LNTorch #LNTrustChain
— Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) February 26, 2019
The lightning network is an up-and-coming – yet still experimental – technology being built as an extra layer to Bitcoin, allowing users to pass funds around the world quickly and without a third party, unlike more traditional payments options like Mastercard and Paypal.
Fidelity Investments’ crypto-centric arm, Digital Asset Services, publicly accepted a Lightning Network transaction last week. The cryptocurrency branch of the Wall Street giant, which has approximately $2 trillion in assets under management, joined in on the multi-week Trust Chain fun, accepting a transaction for 3.64 million satoshis.
Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of both Twitter and Square, also threw in his hat. Per previous reports from Ethereum World News, days after Dorsey took to Joe Rogan’s podcast to laud Bitcoin as a contender for the Internet’s native currency, he picked up the torch while bashing altcoins, like Ethereum and Tron.
What’s Next?
Although the Trust Chain’s recent run-ins with tech celebrities are undoubtedly a positive sign for Lightning, there’s much more to this ecosystem than meets the eye. Dorsey, for instance, recently divulged that he intends to add the scaling technology into Square, the fintech company he heads that is more valuable than his social media powerhouse.
So far the torch has passed through at least 137 countries and has been held 224 times, according to a site set up to track the chain of transactions.
Using the Twitter platform, people pass on the “torch payment” by adding 10,000 satoshis worth $0.35 (at the press time) to the actual payment made to others. The community terms this as the “LN Trust Chain”. Also, anyone holding the torch has to send it some they trust and who will pass it further.
Bitcoin Lightning Tech Expands
Bitcoin’s lightning network has taken a big step toward a better user experience courtesy of new work by one of its principal open-source developers.
Widely believed to be the key to helping the cryptocurrency reach a mainstream audience by pushing it to handle millions of transactions, lightning still has a lot of work ahead of it. It is still not safe to use, and the current way of generating addresses for accepting payments is not as easy or dynamic as it could be.
But that is starting to change. Lightning Labs CTO Olaoluwa Osuntokun recently released a rough draftof a code change that would allow users to accept an address that doesn’t need to change each time. It’s a proof of concept, showing that payments can be made with a static address.
Sending Transaction To Iran ‘Very Difficult’
However, The Lightning Network (LN) faced unusual censorship allegations this weekend after it emerged a participant in the Lightning Torch event refused to include a member from Iran. Coinex executive Ziya Sadr confirmed Peach Inc. senior software engineer Vijay Boyapati declined his request to be involved.
Very sad. Hopefully someone outside the US can do it
— hodlonaut 13%er 🌮⚡🔑 🐝 (@hodlonaut) February 25, 2019
Sadr responded by avoiding calls to label Boyapati a “moron” for his decision, only confirming the legitimacy of the events.
Earlier this month, Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Binance nominated Tesla CEO Elon Musk as the next contender. Dorsey as well had recommended Musk’s name to keep the torch flame going. However, Musk has maintained his silence on this matter so far.
According to the latest Lightning Network statistics by 1ML, there are currently 24,463 channels on Lightning and 6124 reachable nodes. The total payment capacity of the network stands at 655 BTC ($2.35 million). The growing numbers show a formidable growth between 14-24 percent on monthly basis.