Portuguese software engineer João Almeida recently created Poketoshi, a new platform that lets you play Nintendo’s Pokémon using the Lightning Network.

Poketoshi combines Lightning Network with popular live streaming video platform Twitch, enabling it to interact with the game through an online chat room of the existing ‘Twitch Plays Pokémon‘ series. The commands are entered through a Lightning-enabled virtual controller, which cost 10 Satoshi per command (about $0.00066). All payments are made through OpenNode, a Lightning-enabled Bitcoin payment processor for merchants.

Lightning Network is an additional layer that sits on top of a bitcoins blockchain to make the transactions faster and cheaper. It is aimed to be a solution to Bitcoin’s scalability limitations by opening keeping a majority of transaction off-chain through separate payment channels. While the technology is still in testing, the early results are promising.

Even though this project demonstrates the utility of Lightning Network, it does not have an actual effect on in-game user experience.

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