A few hours ago, Lightning Labs announced Loop In, a solution for receiving payments through the second layer of Bitcoin, Lightning Network.
After launching Lightning Loop last March, a non-custodial system to manage Lightning channels, the company has in fact decided to continue developing new services to facilitate the use of LN on all fronts.
As explained in the official post of the service announcement, Loop In was created to be inexpensive, fast and easy to use in order to allow spending and buying any kind of goods or even to replenish the wallet with funds by deciding whether to close the current channel and open a new one (“channel churn”) or use Loop In.
In fact, when the wallet is empty, Loop In does not close but remains open indefinitely and can be reloaded by any other wallet that supports on-chain transactions, including exchanges.
“Not only does Loop In provide benefits to the user, the reduction in channel churn also helps promote network stability. If end users were to constantly close and open channels rather than reuse them, routing nodes would also likely have to open and close channels more frequently to manage their capital and channel balance. Additional routing channel churn would increase routing costs and would also make the channel graph more difficult to synchronize, resulting in less reliable routing for end users”, Lightning Labs explains in the official press release.
The Lightning Labs roadmap beyond Loop In
According to the report, the company is working to further reduce costs, improve privacy and speed up transactions. To do so, it is considering implementing solutions such as Schnorr, Taproot, MuSig and AMP to aggregate signatures and channels.
