Lightning Labs Blog

by Tankred Hase

In a recent post we covered the new Lightning App from a UX perspective. In this post we’ll dig deeper into its software architecture with a focus on security and threat modeling.

(Source: www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/03/beyond-browser-web-desktop-apps/)

App Architecture

As depicted above, the desktop application is based on Electron. Electron allows cross-platform desktop applications to be developed from a single code base for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s based on the Chromium project from Google and is being developed by GitHub.

by Bryan Vu

Our previous two posts in this series have been about Carol, a future Lightning user. For this post, we’ll be traveling back to the present, where Alice lives with substandard mobile Bitcoin apps. In Alice’s world, smartphones have been the predominant global computing platform for years, but the current generation of Bitcoin apps leave a lot to be desired. The options she’s tried have had major flaws in security, privacy, and/or ease-of-use.

Several of today’s top mobile Bitcoin wallets are built on centralized services that present significant security risks. As a wise man said more than once: “Not your keys, not your Bitcoin.” Centralized services also risk exposure of users’ financial information (i.e. transaction histories). On the other hand, centralized services are faster, easier to use, and work for new users with small amounts of bitcoin. As a long-time, experienced bitcoiner, Alice has quite a few friends who have lost money with centralized services, so she decides to continue on her quest for a wallet that gives her full control of her bitcoins.

Today, we’re excited to announce the latest release of lnd, v0.5-beta! The key focus for this release was to enable end-user apps (aka “light clients”) with a BIP 157/158-compliant implementation of the Neutrino protocol. In addition, we’ve made major improvements in safety and security of user funds, along with features that lay the groundwork for the next release of lnd, which will focus on routing nodes. We’ve also added another Tor privacy option, and as always, we’ve made numerous improvements to optimize performance and increase reliability. A few of the highlights are listed below, and for the full details, please see the release notes.

by Tankred Hase

Today we’re excited to announce the release of the new version of our Lightning desktop app. This release includes a complete redesign and optimized backend targeted toward light clients.

In a recent post we covered Lightning UX from a high level perspective and discussed which components and infrastructure would be required for a Lightning Network that is not only reliable but also usable by average users. In this post, we’ll highlight one crucial component of that puzzle, namely the Lightning App, which is our user-facing wallet application.

by Bryan Vu

When we last left our hero Carol, she had successfully joined the Lightning Network and started making Lightning transactions. As she’s become familiar with the user experience side of Lightning, she’s also started to become more interested in Lightning from a technical standpoint. She’s even thinking about running a Lightning routing node herself, with the goal of earning enough in routing fees to pay for her monthly BitFlix subscription. This post is oriented toward budding enthusiasts like Carol who are interested in running Lightning nodes, who are building applications for the Lightning Network, or who are just curious about Lightning. Note that this post is targeted at users who already have some basic knowledge of Lightning and payment channels.

by Bryan Vu

The goal of this post is to give the Bitcoin community and prospective Lightning users insight into what the end user experience of the Lightning Network will be like once the initial infrastructure components are complete. Here, we’re focusing on the story of Carol, a new Lightning user, and we’ll also be touching on some of the projects that we at Lightning Labs are working on that will make this experience a reality. Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll be following up with additional posts that will provide more details about these projects and topics including routing, watchtowers, neutrino, mobile, backups and more.

Meet Carol

Today, we at Lightning Labs are announcing the release of lnd 0.4-beta! This release marks the 4th major release of lnd and the first Lightning mainnet beta, an important milestone. 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.

by Conner Fromknecht

Since the activation of segwit, there’s been a renewed excitement around the idea of cross-chain atomic swaps. Up until a few days ago, some old school swaps were set up to trade 1000 Bitcoin, approximately $8M, for a now-defunct altcoin, and a handful of atomic swaps have been successfully performed involving notable segwit-enabled chains. Today, Lightning Labs is excited to announce that we have successfully tested the first Lightning cross-chain atomic swap between the Bitcoin and Litecoin testnets!

by Olaoluwa Osuntokun

Today, we’re thrilled to be releasing a new cross-platform demo Desktop App for lnd. The release of this new demo wallet kicks-off a two-week “testing blitz” during which we hope Lightning users with a technical inclination can start testing the wallet, giving feedback, filing bugs, etc.

You can download the Lightning Desktop App from our official release on Github!