Jack Dorsey-backed spiral plot course for mainstream adoption of Bitcoin’s Lightning network

Bitcoin’s Lightning Network may be moving closer to mainstream adoption, like LDK—one of the main implementations of the network—puts forward one ambitious new roadmap to improve functionality and accessibility for users.

Lightning Development Kit, also known as LDK, is a project of Bitcoin open source development entity Spiral, which is funded by Jack Dorsey’s Block. LDK plays a significant role on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, and the project’s team recently showcased technical improvements during one Twitter Spaces which they plan to work on over the next year.

That’s significant given the belief among Bitcoin supporters that if anything takes Bitcoin mainstream, it will be the Lightning Network, which makes payments cheaper, faster and more scalable. But while the Lightning Network is functional, it’s rough around the edges and isn’t always easy for new users to send payments.

First, there is a difference between custody-free and non-custodial Lightning mobile wallets. Custodial wallets require the user to trust the wallet provider with the funds, while non-custodial wallets give wallets sole control over their own funds.

“The Lightning Network is a pretty good user experience today for Lightning Network wallets. However, there are still significant UX, privacy, and scaling issues for non-custodial Lightning wallets,” Steve Lee told the Spiral executive. Decrypt.

The LDK Roadmap, composed of a number of features, aims to tackle this problem – with the goal of making the Lightning Network more attractive to mainstream users.

2023 Lightning Development Kit. Source: LDK

Bitcoin UX improvements

LDK is different from LND and C-lightning, the most widely used software implementations of the Lightning Network. The LDK team aims to be more modular and flexible to make developers’ lives easier when building (especially mobile) Lightning wallets and apps. And there are two features on the roadmap in particular that are unique to LDK.

Although the LDK is not a node itself, developers can build custom Lightning nodes that fit their needs with it. But the freedom LDK provides is too intimidating for developers new to building on the network, Lee noted in the Twitter realm.

A key feature on the roadmap is LDK Node Mobile, which offers a simpler setup for creating a node. Nodes are a key part of any Lightning app. They connect the app to the rest of the network, allowing users to send and receive payments. Instead of taking developers days or weeks to build a node with LDK, Lee claims that LDK Node will shrink this time to hours.

Another unique function that LDK works with is what is called “asynchronous payments”. One of the annoying problems that Lightning mobile users face is that if they try to send a mobile payment to a friend, the friend must be online to receive the payment or the payment will fail. Hovering over a phone to wait for a payment kind of defeats the purpose of lightning speed payments. Users don’t have to deal with this issue when sending a Venmo payment, so why is Bitcoin necessary?

Spiral developer and longtime Bitcoin contributor Matt Corallo has let go a proposal to avoid this problem in 2021. And as the LDK roadmap shows, a main focus of the LDK team over the next year is to implement asynchronous payments.

Lightning’s decentralized future

Then there are a number of other changes that LDK developers are working on that will increase the usability of the payment system. If you’ve been following the whirlwind of Bitcoin and Lightning Network development, you may have heard of some of them, as other implementations are also adopting these changes to make them more widespread.

LDK works to adopt BOLT 12, a proposal to make it easier to bill and accept Lightning payments. It’s a hodgepodge of features with unpleasantly technical names (like “onion messages” and “blinded paths”). But the short of it is that BOLT 12 will provide a better user experience where users can reuse Lightning invoices to accept payments. BOLT 12 also increases privacy. With “blind paths”, a user can accept payments without revealing their identity. Normally, the sender knows the public key, which is the identity of the node they are sending a payment to. But with blind paths, this information is shielded.

Another big gain comes support for the privacy function Tapioca. In 2021, Taproot was Bitcoin’s biggest upgrade in years. Slowly, the effects of Taproot ripple out to Bitcoin projects like Lightning. Taproot will shield Lightning transactions, rendering them invisible so they look exactly like normal Bitcoin transactions. If you look at one block explorer to see all Bitcoin transactions ever made, Lightning transactions usually stand out, as they use a technique called “multi-sig.” This can usually be detected since the data will look more complicated than a normal Bitcoin transaction.

This is just scratching the surface of the road map. “There’s no doubt it’s an ambitious roadmap,” Lee said Decrypt, noting that time estimates for development projects can be “difficult”. But it does provide an accurate window into what Lightning Network developers will be working on in the near term.

Lightning developers have a lot of work ahead of them. Improvements to the network are as extensive as the network itself. But with each change they make, a piece is put into place to transform Bitcoin into an easier-to-use payment system.