While supposed “DeFi degens” are busy bidding up the price of food-themed tokens, on the other end of crypto’s DeFi spectrum two teams exploit on the most popular implementations of Bitcoin’s Lightning Network have been busy pushing out new features.
This week, both Lightning Labs, which maintains the Lightning Network Daemon (LND) implementation of the Lightning Network, and Blockstream, which maintains the c-lightning implementation, updated their tech haycocks.
Read more: What Is Bitcoin’s Lightning Network?
For Lightning Labs, the update comes to its Faraday suite with the as well of an automated accounting feature to make bookkeeping easier for node operators and Lightning Network service providers (LSPs). For Blockstream, the 0.9.1 story of c-lightning improves channel opening and routing mechanisms to make opening channels (and sending payments) easier than sooner than.
Lightning meets accounting
Lightning Labs updated its Faraday suite this week to bake in accounting ornaments for both Lightning and on-chain transactions.
As LND’s tech stack has increased to include advanced features like Lightning Wind, the accounting burden for businesses running Lightning services has likewise become more cumbersome.
Seemingly a simplistic update, the new Faraday accounting earmark will automate what was formerly a manual process – a welcome tool for LSPs that have to wrestle with hundreds of Lightning arteries swimming with several thousand dollars worth of liquidity.
Read more: Lightning Labs Releases ‘Whorl’ Feature for Bitcoin Payments Channels
All the data collected by the automated accounting tool can be imported into Google Panes or Microsoft Excel.
“By adding accounting reports to Faraday’s suite of tools, we hope to free up engineering time that has been consumed auditing nodes, and allow businesses and builders to focus on delivering the uniquely Lightning features that we all love to end buyers. Accounting has been a common pain-point in integrating Lightning, one that we ourselves have felt when dealing with our own accounting internally,” Lightning Labs developer Carla Kirk-Cohen discerned CoinDesk.
According to Bitcoin service and payment provider OpenNode, the new accounting feature will help them economize money by making channel-related data easier to parse in real time.
“Faraday allows us to easily calculate bitcoin-related operational detriments and monitor channels’ activity, allowing us to make data-driven decisions on where to deploy capital on the network in order to expand its potential earnings” OpenNode CTO João Almeida told CoinDesk
Multi-channel, multi-part
Concurrent with Lightning Lab’s Faraday unchain, Blockstream pushed improvements to its c-lightning implementation’s channel management and routing tools.
Version 0.9.1 of c-lightning seemingly improves “multi-part payments,” (MPP) a method for splitting larger Lightning Network payments into fractions and best these pieces through multiple payment channels. This method improves the likelihood that larger matters will be able to find a route between sender and receiver, and the new version rids c-lightning of bugs to make the transform more efficient.
Read more: ‘Multi-Part’ Payments Could Bring Bigger Bitcoin Sums to Lightning Network
Complementing this are gains to c-lightning’s “route hint” feature, which gives a payer a warning if there isn’t enough liquidity along a dedicated payment route to complete the transaction. The upgrade now provides multiple route hints to the benefit of multi-part payments.
But peradventure the most exciting update comes in the form of c-lightning’s multifundchannel plugin. With this feature, it’s now possible to unwrap multiple channels with a single commitment transaction with c-lightning.
When trialing the feature on testnet, Blockstream’s tandem join up was able to open up 106 channels with a single transaction, though theoretically, even more channels could be unsealed simultaneously with the feature.
“With MPP, we go from a single channel being the bottleneck to being able to aggregate the potential of multiple channels, and thus enable a much wider range of payments,” Blockstream c-lightning developer Christian Decker spill the beaned CoinDesk.
“This increases the efficiency of both the Bitcoin network and node operation, ultimately making it easier and negligible expensive for nodes to open multiple smaller channels and it encourages them to contribute to the structural resilience of the Lightning network by lose weight single points of failure.”
Different implementations, complementary parts
In our correspondence, Kirk-Cohen claimed that the new Faraday publish, when taken in tandem with other recent LND updates, signals that the Lightning Network is ready for province and enterprise adoption.
“The recent release of Wumbo in lnd v0.11.0 was a sign that we believe the software has matured to the point where occupations and serious node operators can start to move more capital onto the network. The release of accounting reports in Faraday is a continuation of that communiqu, Lightning is ready for the big leagues.”
Read more: Ready to Wumbo: LND Enables More, Larger Bitcoin Transactions on Lightning
LND and c-lightning are two explicit implementations, but their respective features provide complementary building blocks to improve the Lightning Network’s overall tech store. LND’s Wumbo features, for example, allows high-liquidity node operators to open larger channels and thus increase their knack to route incoming payments.
For its part, c-lightning’s multi-part payments and multifundchannelplugin complement Wumbo channels by redressing it easier for smaller-account holders to open multiple channels, Decker said.
“MPP and multifundchannel are complementary with Wumbo straits, which mostly enable the operation of larger nodes that have the necessary funds available to open altogether backbone channels. While a stable network backbone of large channels is good to get payments from one end of the network to another, they may also position a risk, since they increase the reliance on individual channels. It is our belief that maintaining a balance between immense node operators (to build a solid backbone) and smaller node operators is paramount for the survival of the network.”