For 2020, we expect an increase in the number of developers of plugins and add-ons over lightning
By: Саша N
Tags: Lightning Network, C Lightning, Bitcoin, Layer 2, Lnd

2019 was the year of rapid growth for LND Network. But still there is much to be done. This article is aimed at reviewing the trends and repositories that are worth paying attention to this upcoming year. We looked into teams that are actively promoting their development, and will examine products of repositories with commitments in the last two weeks.

1. https://lightningnetworkstores.com — a news and advertisement board for companies and service providers. Managed through Github. Apparently the project is supported.

2. There was an attempt to simplify the lightning of wallets using SPV technology while maintaining control over user’s private keys. For example https://nayuta.co/wallet/ and https://phoenix.acinq.co tried to do this. However, most wallets remain custodial.

3. We at ZigZag still see big problems for newbies (for beginners) to start using lightning. Many users don’t understand why we can’t send them Lightning in exchange FOR Bitcoins (the term “inbound capacity” is a big issue for mass adoption). In practise, we cannot add funds to new Wallets, that is why most exchanges are withdrawal transactions. It is also impossible, for example, to top up phoenix from a satishi wallet, etc.

4. That being said, https://kriptode.com/satsforlikes/index.html remains the easiest and cheapest way to open a channel in your direction (by paying less than 1% of the channel volume)

5. There is an increase in the number of support services for development on top of the lightning service. We tried out BTCpayserver by LUNANODE, which gives a full note and api to it only for $5. There is also an interesting service — https://bitclouds.sh, which can be accessed from the command line.

We are confident that in the future, programs using lightning will be put together from pieces like a construction puzzle which will make it easier. For example, Github provided a limitless number of free resources for open source projects, that allows assembling any kind of programs for different platforms.

RGB

A team that claims to be able to make anonymous smart contracts without loading the main network by gradually implementing minimal changes to the lightning protocol. Very ambitious plans.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ccLOmbPGq8xcJSVSaWDOlgHb3KMH1OkU/view?usp=sharing RGBCONN 0 (day 1..3)

Taproot and Shnorr algorithms will soon be used in bitcoin (killers of anonymous cryptocurrencies)

The team is supported by Bitfinex, tether, and Fulgur ventures (our investor). We are following the development of the protocol and are going to support it by implementing it in ZigZag.

LND

There are many changes going on at LND. Four developers are contributing very actively.

We use this node to operate our service, and so far everything is working fine. However, we had to face a change in the api syntax and customize our software for the new one. We hope that there will be fewer changes like these, as well as interoperability, otherwise it is difficult to build a complex long-term software, relying on such quick changes IMHO.

Other projects

https://github.com/shesek/spark-wallet — is a wallet for c-lightning . According to their commitments, they’re not actively developing

https://github.com/nayutaco/ptarmigan/ — one more implementation of the lightening on С++ from Japan.

https://github.com/dan-da/lightning-nodes — is a cool php script that loads into the repository a list of active connections from a lightning node.

https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc — is being actively discussed. Since this is a big topic a separate review will be done.

https://github.com/breez/breezmobile — a non-custodian wallet.

https://github.com/lightningd/plugins — many plugins for c-lightning are good. In general, the marketplace (plugins) is a very cool driver for platform growth. The most successful example is WordPress, which, thanks to countless plugins and themes, has become the most popular platform for websites on the Internet. In this regard, we are betting on the development of c-lightening, as more developers will connect to it. You can see a lot of repositories from external authors, which shows the great interest of independent developers. While lnd only allows you to pay and receive payments.

Custodian backends as https://github.com/BlueWallet/LndHub (btspey) or our payserver continue to develop, but their development slowed down. Unfortunately, we are forced to stop supporting our own payserver and have switched to working directly with the cryptocurrencies api.

For 2020, we expect an increase in the number of developers of plugins and add-ons over lightning. More and more beautiful and complex services will appear that will lead to an increase in the number of use cases. A big step forward was the ability to transfer data within the lightning network. For example, now you can store DEXs orderbook and other layer 3 (for example, swap.online uses the libp2p network for this).

In Zigzag we are going to connect usdt and support the idea of replacing anonymous currencies and cryptocurrencies with smart contracts on layer3 bitcoin solutions.

Your team…