Californian startup Lightning Labs on Thursday announced the launch of the beta version of its software – LND, which marks the fourth major release of the software and the first Lightning mainnet beta.
The startup is focused at leveraging the power of blockchains and smart contracts to make cheap, fast, private transactions available to everyone. With the beta launch, users would now be able to send bitcoin and litecoin to other users, without the need to settle those transactions on the blockchain, CoinDesk explained.
“With this release, lnd has gained a considerable feature set, deeper cross-implementation compatibility, a new specialized wallet seed, comprehensive fault-tolerance logic, a multitude of bug fixes, and much more! This release is also the first release of lnd that has the option to run on Bitcoin’s mainnet, with the safety, security, and reliability features necessary for real-world, real money usage,” Lightning Labs said in a blog post.
In addition to the launch, Lightning Labs has announced a seed funding round in which it raised $2.5 million from a number of prominent names in the industry.
TechCrunch reported that the investors includes the likes of Square and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Square exec Jacqueline Reses, serial-founder-turned investor David Sacks, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz, BitGo CTO Ben Davenport and Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev, along with The Hive, Digital Currency Group and others.
https://twitter.com/DCGco/status/974301025040519173
Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark hopes that the launch of the lnd beta and the funding round will help advance Lightning Network technology into the next phase of development.
“Lightning is not just about scalability, it’s also an app development platform. I think a lot of people don't get that yet,” Stark told Bitcoin Magazine.
