Bitfury announces first successful multi-hop Lightning Network transaction

The Bitfury Group, a full-service blockchain technology company, announced Wednesday that it has successfully completed the first multi-hop Lightning Network transaction.

In a newly released video which is shown down below, Bitfury developers walk viewers through the process and demonstrate how the team could send a real Litecoin payment using Bitfury’s user-friendly Lightning Network interface.

The video shows a successful multi-hop transaction, which is a transaction that involves multiple participating nodes as opposed to only the two nodes sending and receiving the payment. In Bitfury’s demonstration, there are three participating nodes, and the payment moves from the first node to the third node through the second, on two pre-opened Lightning Network (LN) channels. Bitfury’s walk-through demonstrates how LN’s key distinguishing feature — routed payments — can allow for instant micro-transactions.

For over a year, Bitfury has been supporting the development and implementation of the Lightning Network. In July 2016, Bitfury released a white paper in collaboration with the Lightning Network team detailing the specifications for Flare, an algorithm developed to improve payment routing in the Lightning Network. In September 2016, the Flare algorithm was successfully implemented and tested by Paris-based blockchain firm ACINQ, who also recently successfully test sent a Lightning Litecoin transaction. Now, Bitfury has successfully tested its Lightning specification on Litecoin.

The hashes of the channel funding transactions made by the Bitfury team are:

af3bc396cc6ea9fe10ae6c0b2691e40635f0286b356dcb962488ea6d9e15b0c8

87d25c3a6d895f5fff6892495e57814db58280e32eb4697428ac1e8c61a8a5c7