Do Not Bet Against the Lightning Network

Acinq just announced the next generation of Phoenix, their self-custodial Lightning wallet.

This has massive implications for the UX of the Lightning Network, as the update comes with splicing enabled.

Splicing lets you make alterations to a channel that has already been opened. Every lightning channel that has been opened before splicing was enabled was unalterable.

This means that the funds that you already had in the channel were all you could use to transact with your counterparty. If you wanted to send more funds than what was available in the channel, you had to open a new channel, which involves an on-chain transaction, leading to increases transaction fees. Managing these channels can become a huge burden as well, bringing with it a lot of risks for an ordinary user.

To put it simply, splicing drastically improves the UX of self-custodial Lightning wallets, especially for users who don’t have the technical know-how to deal with lightning channels.

Not only that, exiting the Lightning Network and transferring your funds to an on-chain wallet has become much easier as well!

At Bringin, we have a goal of building tools that make it easy to use Bitcoin for all 700 million Europeans.

The Lightning Network is crucial to achieving this goal.

We see things not only for what they are, but also for what they could be.

And the Lightning Network could be a unified, interoperable, open source, privacy-preserving payments layer for all of Europe, scaling the sound and secure monetary and cryptographic properties of the Bitcoin network to 700 million Europeans.

However, the path towards that goal is riddled with a lot of technical and regulatory hurdles, which we are ready to face. In fact, we are facing them right now with a strong conviction that they can be overcome. We are not backing down, and if you are building tools that make it easy for people to use Bitcoin, neither should you.

We are paying close attention to other participants of the Lightning ecosystem and what they are building, and a lot of our conviction comes from the energy we see from them.

Congratulations Acinq! And thank you for keeping us motivated with all the work that you do.