Altcoin News: Electrum Wallet Will Start Supporting Lightning Network

July 8, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

The popular Electrum wallet in the next release will add support for the Lightning Network technology.

Electrum founder Thomas Voegtlin said at the blockchain event BIP001 in Odessa, Ukraine that the work on the solution for sending Lightning transactions from the Electrum wallet is close to completion. Although he declined to give a specific release date, Voegtlin said:

“We’ve been doing this work for about a year in a separate branch [on GitHub] and we’ve reached the point when we are ready to merge it with our master branch. This is going to happen in the coming weeks until the end of July, and it means that the next major release will have lightning support.”

At the event, Voegtlin showed a test version of the wallet on his mobile phone. The second-tier payment technology, launched in beta last March, is actively supported and developed by several different development teams all over the world. However, Voegtlin noted that Electrum decided not to integrate with existing Lightning customers, and instead developed its own implementation.

The product will be similar to the Lightning Eclair wallet, which itself uses Electrum servers to interact with the Bitcoin network. Likewise, Electrum uses its servers for BTC transactions, but it will not do this to interact with Lightning, Voegtlin explained.

More and more wallets and cryptocurrency sites add support for the Lightning Network. Recently, a startup Breez released a mobile wallet for iPhone with Lightning support, and previously BlueWallet released a Lightning wallet application for the Apple Watch.

In addition, in June, the HodlHodl cryptocurrency exchange added support for the Lightning Network, and last May, the Vaultoro exchange, exchanging Bitcoin for gold, introduced payments through LN. In the spring of this year, a new Bitcoin exchange was launched with support for the Lightning Network and “underwater swaps”.

Author: Marko Vidrih