Lightning Labs aims to help ‘Bring Bitcoin to Billions’ with latest upgrade

The team at Bitcoin tech startup Lightning Labs, one of the main developers of Bitcoin’s fast and scalable Lightning Network, has released an update to the Litd node management tool designed to make Bitcoin and Lightning easier to use.

Users must run a Lightning “node” to send and receive payments on the network without a escrow, meaning without the help of a third party, a feat not easy for users who aren’t tech-savvy or don’t want to spend hours learning in and out of the protocol to send a payment.

Lightning Labs manages a tool called Lightning Terminal to make managing Lightning nodes easier. Behind the scenes, Litd aims to abstract certain functions of node management so that users don’t have to manage them directly, making it easier to use Lightning.

“We’ve heard consistent feedback from the Lightning developer community about the need for increased automation of node management and better developer tools for seamless onboarding of new Lightning users,” said Michael Levan, head of product growth at Lightning Labs. Decryptadding that these changes will make it easier to bring new users to the network “regardless of their experience level”.

One update of Litd is to “automagically” update Lightning charges. Lightning routing nodes charge small fees to forward payments to a destination. Usually, whoever operates the Lightning node must manually increase or decrease the fees. But Lightning Labs came up with a new algorithm to dynamically update these fees based on how many payments each channel routes each week.

Another is the introduction of “accounts”. Typically, each user has one Lightning node. But the new account system allows many users to share a single Lightning node. “With accounts, developers can bring less advanced users to Lightning without having to understand any complexity of liquidity or node management,” Levin said. “Liquidity” is a major UX hurdle for new users; they must first ensure that a Lightning channel is open for them to receive funds, which requires some knowledge of how Lightning works. New users don’t want to have to deal with all this.

These Litd updates are part of an industry-wide effort to make Lightning easier to use for the average Joe. Earlier this month, Lightspark unveiled a suite of tools to help businesses onboard to Lightning, for example.

“These new features will help the Lightning developer community continue on its path to bring bitcoin to billions around the world,” Levin said.