Location: Boulder, Colorado

Date: Monday, 23rd December

Project: Zap

Role: Founder

The Lightning Network is a layer two solution that allows users to send and receive Bitcoin 'off-chain'. Sending and receiving transactions on Lightning is both fast and cheap, allowing the Bitcoin network to scale while maintaining decentralisation by keeping the basechain block size small.

The technology isn't perfect though. In its current state, the Lightning Network can be complicated and intimidating to newcomers as the user experience has key differences from transacting on the basechain. Lightning is developing at pace, and UX design is abstracting away many of the intricacies of the network.

Lightning as a micropayment mechanism for the mainstream market is just one potential use. Jack Mallers, Founder of the Lightning Network wallet Zap, thinks that Lightning may have a far broader value proposition.

In this interview, I review The Lightning Network in 2019 with Zap founder Jack Mallers. We discuss why Lightning matters, private key management, custodial v non-custodial wallets, and how proprietary trading firms may be the next big use case.