Lightning Network has officially landed on the Bitcoin test network, waiting for the activation of isolated verification

Currently, developers can participate in testing the much-anticipated project in the Bitcoin field - Lightning Network (LN).

Lightning Labs, a San Francisco-based startup, is an expert in open source micropayment protocols and the creator of the Lightning Network. Currently, LN runs on the Bitcoin testnet, so it is not available to ordinary users for the time being. However, as the best expansion solution for the Bitcoin network, developers can already start testing off-chain transactions (it seems that some people have already started testing).

The Lightning Labs team told CoinDesk that the LN running on the testnet is the “most feature-complete” version ever.

It meets all the requirements for off-chain network operation, including the opening and closing of channels and the selection of network payment paths.

Elizabeth Stark, co-founder of Lightning Labs, said:

Our goal in launching LN on the testnet is to tell the world, 'Hey, all the features are here', and then encourage them to contribute to this test version.

Joseph Poon, another Lightning Labs founder and one of the authors of the original LN white paper, added that the purpose of launching this test version is to help developers prepare for the official launch of LN on the Bitcoin blockchain and solve some integration problems in advance.

In general, Lightning Labs is happy to help interested developers.

Developer Olaoluwa Osuntokun said:

We hope that they will test and contribute to LN next, after all, it is now fully public.

He also mentioned that Lightning Labs will publish a complete testing guide on Thursday, including a "channel faucet" (translator's note: see Bitcoin faucet), which will distribute test coins for free for transaction testing.

Bitfury, Blockchain Lab, Chaincode Labs, and MIT DCI all contributed to this release.

If you want to learn more about LN, you can check out the standards process on GitHub: it lists about 8 features that LN projects must support in order to achieve interoperability.

Currently, developers’ testing process is done by running a Bitcoin node, but there is still an urgent need for an LN-compatible client.

Ostuntkun said they may be able to make up for this shortcoming through other tools, such as the user interface.

Development obstacles

However, releasing a beta version may not be considered a milestone in the community's mind.

Currently, this version is not compatible with the existing Bitcoin codebase (assuming that Segregated Witness is activated); Segregated Witness (SegWit) will make off-chain channels more secure (Poon emphasized that in the long run, it will also improve the scripting language and bring more advantages).

Although most of the Bitcoin community agrees that the Segregated Witness code has significant advantages, it remains highly controversial. Since November last year, only 25% of miners (the activation threshold is 95%) have announced support for Segregated Witness.

Stark said:

We released this beta version because we want to see the activation of Segwit. Try to think back to the past few soft forks. Just because the number of miners supporting Segwit has not changed, it cannot be asserted that the 95% activation threshold is impossible to achieve.

She said quarantine verification ballots will be valid until November 15 of this year.

Poon and Osuntokun pointed out that LN is feasible without segwit, but its functionality will be limited and the user experience will not be optimal.

Poon concluded:

Regardless of the outcome, we are ready to launch LN.