TL;DR We have gathered a small community of developers/hackers/makers that build Lightning Network applications (lapps) focused on pushing Bitcoin’s adoption. Join the conversation: Telegram, Slack, Discord

So for the past year the number of early adopters working with Lightning Network (LN) has been increasing. It’s clear from lnd Slack alone that we have all types of people becoming interested in Lightning.

We have seen with the rise of lapps such as Satoshi’s Place that Lightning is growing beyond early adopters & protocol level developers. Satoshi’s Place users aren’t just Lightning users -they’re crypto fans / advocates/ and also early enthusiasts interested in lapps.

As this point it’s worth explaining lapps are basically lightning powered applications built on top of an LN implementation. A few implementations that are discussed and built upon in our community are LND, C-lightning, and ACINQ. Lightning Network applications package the raw protocol and allow people to take advantage of micropayments, instantaneous bitcoin transactions and near 0 fees.

I was at the recent Berlin hackday organised by Fulmo (Side note: Registration for the third #LightningHackday in Berlin on September 1st is open! https://lightninghackday.fulmo.org/ ). This event also echoed what we’ve seen we have very smart individuals & also people interested in building the next layer, some that aren’t devs at all and just interested in supporting these lapps.