First Lightning payments on Bitcoin mainnet a success

Developers of the Lightning Network protocol, today announced release candidate v1.0 of the Lightning protocol specification along with a successful cross-implementation test on the Bitcoin mainnet.

The Lightning specification was developed by the three teams of ACINQ, Blockstream, Lightning Labs and others in the bitcoin community through an open and collaborative process.

Furthermore, the developers announced the world’s first Lightning payment on the Bitcoin mainnet across all three implementations. These tests are the first multi-hop Lightning payments using real Bitcoin. The teams tested eclair (ACINQ), c-lightning (Blockstream), and lnd (Lightning Labs).

Tests

• For the first test, the coffee shop Starblocks was used as an example eclair application. It accepted an incoming payment in bitcoin from a customer paying with the lnd Lightning app as the client and was routed through c-lightning.
• For the second test, a payment was made from eclair to yalls.org, an article micropayment site on lnd, routed through c-lightning. This highlights another anticipated use case for Lightning: the ability to send instant, small-value payments.

The Lightning developers said:

“We’d like to thank the members of the community who have pitched in so far to help in the collaborative effort to test and build Lightning. Each team is working diligently toward mainnet beta releases for their implementations with a focus on stability and security. As we move towards a final 1.0 version of the specification, we invite the broader community to provide peer review and feedback. We look forward to continuing working together to build the future of Layer 2 scalability technology!”

The three teams have each developed their own Lightning implementations with a focus on cross-compatibility. Interoperability enables a single Lightning Network where payments are seamlessly routed without being isolated or incompatible. The team’s report developing a comprehensive set of integration tests, with all tests currently successful.