MicroStrategy, with Bitcoin’s price depressed, looks like lightning will increase usage, Saylor says
Michael Saylor, who turned a sleepy software company into a cryptocurrency powerhouse via a (currently underwater) multi-billion dollar venture into bitcoin, now also has the non-crypto side of the business working on bitcoin-related projects.
Speaking to an audience at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia, on Saturday, the executive chairman and former CEO of MicroStrategy said the firm’s developers are working on solutions that will enable large numbers of people to be deployed on the Lightning network , a payment network. on top of bitcoin allowing faster and cheaper transactions.
Saylor announced on August 2 that he was stepping down as CEO of MicroStrategy, retaining his position as chairman and assuming the new title of executive chairman. At the time, Saylor said his successor would be able to focus on the company’s software business while continuing his bitcoin evangelism. Now it appears that at least some of the software business is going to be used to make it easier for people to use bitcoin, potentially increasing the value of the company’s cryptocurrency holdings.
Speaking to the audience via video call, Saylor praised Lightning as “the most important thing happening in the world in technology.”
“MicroStrategy has some R&D projects going on right now where we’re working on enterprise applications of Lightning: Enterprise Lightning wallet, Enterprise Lightning servers, enterprise authentication,” Saylor said in the video call.
He said MicroStrategy is looking for solutions that will allow companies to “roll out Lightning to a hundred thousand employees every day” or “open Lightning wallets to 10 million customers overnight.”
It’s still very early stages, and it remains to be seen if any viable products will come out of this, Saylor said.
The announcement closely followed that of the New York Digital Investments Group (NYDIG) during the BitBlockBoom conference in Texas in August, opening a Lightning accelerator to start development of the protocol.
Saylor has been known to be a fan of the Lightning Protocol for some time, and he reiterated his confidence in the technology’s great future.
“The advantage of Lightning is not only that you can scale up bitcoin for billions of people, or get the transaction costs to almost nothing, but also the ethos of bitcoin is to tread very carefully and not move quickly on the base layer without universal consensus, but in Lightning you can you move much more aggressively developing functionality and taking more risks with the applications than you can with the underlying bitcoin layer,” Saylor said.
The Lightning protocol allows users to open payment channels with each other and exchange multiple transactions before they are settled on-chain, helping to minimize fees and confirmation time: in bitcoin, transactions normally take 10 minutes or longer to be considered final.
Also read: Lightning sucks, but it can help build a Bitcoin economy
After the company’s most recent purchase in late June, MicroStrategy owns 129,699 BTC, worth about $2.58 billion at current prices. The company has seen its bitcoin holdings shrink in dollar terms recently as the price of the leading cryptocurrency has lost more than two-thirds of its value since November 2021.
Crypto isn’t the only reason Saylor has been in the news lately. On August 31, the Attorney General of the District of Columbia sued him for allegedly not paying his taxes for the past 10 years. Saylor disputes the allegations.
