Lightning API: Moving to Mainnet
Tags: Lightning Network, Suredbits, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Crypto Data

Today we are moving our Lightning application for data feeds to the Bitcoin mainnet blockchain. This marks a significant step in the growth of Lightning for data feeds and we are excited to share this with our customers and the crypto technology community.

What will be on mainnet?

What this means for Suredbits customers is that our National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA) and Crypto Exchange APIs — all channels, endpoints and data — will now be available on mainnet and monetized with real cryptocurrency.

However, we think it vitally important users have a way to test and experiment with their applications. So we are keeping a portion of our service available on testnet so developers have access to end-to-end data requests.

What will be on testnet?

On the Crypto Exchange API, the BTCUSD trading pair will remain free across all our exchanges: Binance (BTCUSDT), Bitfinex, Bitstamp, Coinbase and Gemini.

For the NFL and NBA data feeds, we have made data for our Info and Games channels entirely free on testnet. In addition, in order to help users test end-to-end applications, we have made data for specific players — Tom Brady for the NFL and Lebron James in for the NBA — available for free across our uniform endpoints: Players, Team & Stats.

Connecting to mainnet

Connecting to the Suredbits mainnet node is simple and straighforward and no different than testnet.

Connect to our mainnet Lightning node url:

038bdb5538a4e415c42f8fb09750729752c1a1800d321f4bb056a9f582569fbf8e@ln.suredbits.com

2. Choose the mainnet websocket or testnet websocket like the example below:

3. Once connected to the Suredbits Lightning node and appropriate websocket, users can begin querying whatever data they wish.

Payment & Pricing

We are keeping our monetization as simple and straightforward as possible.

Note: All payments are transacted in cryptocurrency. For convenience, we have quoted prices in USD equiavalents.

For NFL Data and NBA Data APIs, the cost is $.01 (1 cent) per call.

For our streaming Crypto Exchange API, the cost is $.10 (10 cents) per sixty seconds of streaming data.

Anything less than 60 seconds will be prorated accordingly.

A minimum of 10 satoshis will be charged for all streaming data calls.

Why move to mainnet?

We are excited to bring our streaming data service to mainnet for a number of reasons.

It puts real skin in the game. Now users can subscribe with real bitcoin and receive bitcoin refunds for their data subscriptions. It continues the growth and expansion of of Lightning technology. We are believers in cryptocurrency and the power of Lightning. We consider ourselves part of the growing community of companies and individuals working to make this technology more available and meaningful to people. Most importantly, it makes the benefits of using Bitcoin -secure, private, trustless, decentralized — transactions, a reality for our customers.

As always, if you’re interested in chatting more about Lightning Network technology or crypto tech, you can find us on Twitter @Suredbits or join our Suredbits Slack community.

Some additional reading you may find of interest: