Read Part 1 of our series, Bitcoin’s 2019 in Tech: What This Year Brought Us, here. [1]
Even as we entered 2019 in a bear market, the receding bitcoin price was matched by a rising tide of excitement for and development on Bitcoin’s second layer payment protocol, the Lightning Network. Over the course of the year, we saw payment routing improvements, the introduction of mobile wallets, a flush of liquidity into the network and the emergence of Lightning fiat ramps.
Oh yeah, and we also watched as a Lightning payment bounced around the globe over 275 times via Bitcoin Twitter, all started by an anonymous astronautical tomcat (this was one of many community developments that encapsulated the teeming excitement around the new technology).
Here are our highlights for the Lightning Network in 2019.
Wallets
A dozen or so new Lightning wallets proliferated in 2019, overwhelmingly for mobile devices.
One of the most anticipated, Lightning Lab’s Lightning Wallet for iOS and Android[2], was one of the first to make use of Neutrino, a lightweight client that fetches data block-by-block so users can run a noncustodial Lightning wallet without having to run a full Bitcoin node. In its company is Zap, which also leverages Neutrino and launched a desktop and a mobile version this year, and Breez, the first Neutrino mobile wallet that is only available on iOS.
All of the above were released in the summer and run on LND, Lightning’ Lab’s implementation of the technology. For its own implementation, French Lightning development company ACINQ released Phoenix as 2019 was winding down. The Android-only mobile wallet runs a full, lightweight Lightning node on your device.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Tippin.me[3] and the late Bottle Pay[4]. Though Tippin.me technically
