Following last week’s release of the beta-version of Lightning Lab’s Lightning Network, Blockchain -based projects are slowly beginning to adopt the new technology. Stellar, one of the fastest growing blockchain projects, on Monday announced the implementation of Lightning Network on its blockchain, thus becoming one of the first projects to adopt the protocol.
In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Stellar’s co-founder and CTO Jed McCaleb said: “we’re super excited about Lighting [sic]. It’s a great idea and a necessary one if any of these protocols are going to achieve their vision.”
Lightning Network was introduced in response to scalability issues experienced by current blockchain networks. In its official announcement, Lightning Labs described it as containing “safety, security, and reliability features necessary for real-world, real money usage.”
The team behind Stellar also released a tentative timeline regarding the protocol’s implementation. According to the document, a BUMP_SEQUENCE will be pushed to a testnet on April 1, 2018, followed by beta implementation for state channels on August 1, 2018.
State channels will be fully implemented on the Stellar livenet and a Lightning Network Beta on October 1, 2018, and a fully functional Lightning Network will hit the livenet on December 1, 2018.
The move to implement Lightning Network on the Stellar blockchain is based on the growing requirements of the firm’s clients, which include tech giants such as Kik and IBM. McCaleb raised concerns that even though Stellar’s current blockchain is much more scalable than that of Ethereum, it would not be able to handle a client like Kik moving all its transactions on to the blockchain.
“We have a lot of partnerships that have been announced and that will be announced soon that will start pushing the threshold for what Stellar can do. In order to keep the network efficient and stable, we need something like Lightning,” McCaleb said.
He also revealed that his team is actively seeking feedback from developers and researchers before the commercial implementation of the new protocol.
XLM's market performance, Coinmarketcap.com
Meanwhile, XLM, the token issued by Stellar, enjoyed a 60 percent rise from $0.15 to $0.24 in the last 48 hours, following a steep crash over the weekend. The coin is currently the 7th largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of over $4.6 billion, according to Coinmarketcap.com.
