Starlight will lock transaction funds in a secure channel where only settlement balances are revealed

Starlight will eliminate a huge amount of time-consuming processes

The team will improve the next versions to support all other tokens on the Stellar network

The new payment channel works differently from the traditional transactions on the Stellar network that involves publishing details of the transaction and waiting for consensus to be confirmed before funds are transferred. Starlight will lock transaction funds in a secure channel where payments do not require the network and only settlement balances are revealed at the conclusion.

Real-time Zero Fee Transactions

Interstellar launched a demo of Starlight, a bidirectional payment channel on the Stellar (XLM) channel similar to Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. The new channel will enable users of the Stellar network to send zero-fee transactions privately in real time and will for the time being only allow transactions of Lumens, which is the native digital asset on the Stellar blockchain.

According to the announcement, Starlight will eliminate a huge amount of time-consuming processes that include sending information among the platform users to ensure the legitimacy of a transaction. The information incorporated Stellar transactions that have been signed but henceforth, they won’t be published to the entire network until after the transacting party closes the channel.

After the channel has been closed, it will forward the “transaction settlement” to the respective party’s Stellar account balance. The particular transaction will consider the back-and-forth history of payments from the involved parties to secure the channel. Interstellar stated in the official Medium Account:

“Only the final settlement balances are revealed to the network when the channel closes. All other activity in the channel remains private and known only to its participants.”

The Starlight team says even though their channel resembles Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, it goes a step further because of the support given by the system to secure the payment channel.

The project supports a multi-hop payment that transcends from channel to channel and, according to the team; it plans to develop the project further to enhance its compatibility with other payment-channel networks such as Lightning and Interledger.

Upcoming Support for Other Tokens

The product released by Interstellar will only initially support bilateral channels and comes with Starlight payment channel software that has a built-in wallet App. The team plans to improve the next versions so they can support all other tokens trading on the Stellar network besides Lumens.

The team advised users that the Demo products they released could have issues and is therefore running on Stellar testnet to ensure that no user loses their funds. They, therefore, advise users to stick to the testnet and not try to use Starlight with the MainNet.