Jack Dorsey has revealed that Square Crypto is focusing on Lightning Network (LN).
Square Crypto is focusing on Lightning! ⚡️ https://t.co/boOiAAlLwc
— jack (@jack) January 22, 2020
Dorsey is the renowned founder of both Twitter and Square and has also been a big fan of Bitcoin for some time now.
In particular, his idea is to integrate Bitcoin functionalities directly into Twitter, which is perhaps also a response to the Facebook stablecoin project, Libra.
The tweet he shared today comes from Square Crypto, which reveals that they’ve set up a team and mission to start working on their Lightning Development Kit or LDK.
The goal is to help establish bitcoin as a widely used global currency, seeing that, as they say, it cannot be stopped, tampered with or manipulated to the advantage of anyone.
To achieve this goal, they aim to improve the user experience (UX), security, privacy and scalability.
Square Crypto has a team of open source developers capable of taking on large projects, considering that they are part of the Square group. This project will also involve Acinq, Blockstream, Lightning Labs and other open-source developers around the world.
Moreover, before making a decision as to which specific projects to commit to, they have consulted with dozens of wallet developers, recognizing the widespread need to have more flexibility during the integration of Lightning Network.
As such, they decided not to create their own Lightning node, but a Lightning Development Kit (LDK) to offer developers of wallets and applications an easier way of creating customized experiences.
The LDK will include APIs, language binding, demo apps, and other features to make Lightning Network integration simple, secure, and configurable, and it will be based on the Rust-Lightning project.
LDK will simplify adding Lightning functionality to existing bitcoin wallets so there is no need to create new ones, it will support multi-device and multi-application access, and will allow wallets to accept a good compromise between UX, security, and privacy.
It is likely that it will take some time before they are ready to release a fully secure and working version of LDK, however, given the magnitude of the effort, it is possible that once released it may actually be instrumental towards greater LN deployment, leading to greater mass adoption of bitcoin.
