Jack Dorsey’s TBD Launches Bitcoin Lightning Provider
Photo by: Johannes Plenio – Unsplash
Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced a new Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) service provider called “C=.” According to an official announcement, the new service is part of the TBD initiative, which aims to create a suite of BTC-based tools to give users more control over their finances.
Hello LN 👋
Was here
— c = (@c_like) March 2, 2023
The Lightning Network is a second-layer payment solution that allows users to send and receive BTC “off-chain.” The solutions increase the transaction on this blockchain and avoid long waiting periods to validate a transaction on the network.
TBD’s new project and Bitcoin as the future of payments
According to the announcement, C= will build the infrastructure to allow people to leverage Bitcoin’s second-tier solution and support “the future of payments.” The new service provider identified the lack of liquidity in LN as a major problem for its use and future.
Via their official Twitter handle, they stated:
Liquidity from trusted nodes can be hard to come by when you need it, making payments difficult. We want to make it easy and reliable for you to send and receive payments over Lightning. We’ve been working behind the scenes with the cats Spiral to create a routing node that will make Lightning easier and more reliable for businesses and people who shop on the network.
The new service provider is looking for partners from different sectors with different needs to work with its LN-based payment infrastructure. In the long term, C= wants to bring one billion users to the BTC ecosystem and improve the current payment rail.
BTC Lightning On A Bull Roll
The Bitcoin Lightning Network has grown rapidly over the past two years. This second-tier payment solution is seeing critical adoption levels, even when the crypto market is trending to the downside.
As Bitcoinist reported last October, research firm Messari recorded an exponential increase in LN’s public capacity. In other words, there was more liquidity in the payment solution, which meant that more people could send payments.
The chart below shows that LN capacity has grown steadily, despite BTC’s price performance, since November 2018. The crypto market also experienced a broad market downtrend at that time. Unlike the nascent sector, the Lightning Network continues to push upward.
Cover image from Unsplash, chart from Tradingview.
