The bear seems to have gone crazy in the cryptospace, as the markets moved to the side for a moment without bullfighting. Altcoins such as Ethereum [ETH], Litecoin [LTC], XRP and Stellar Lumens [XLM] have had the same fate and expect a spike.

Interstellar, the result of the merger between Chain and Lightyear, announces the launch of Starlight, which implements the bidirectional transactional payment channel in Stellar. Transactions in the payment channel are relatively private, secure and occur in no time.

Normal transactions in the blockchain usually take some time for the blocks to reach a consensus, which then makes payments by issuing transaction data to all observers while paying a small fee. This method of payment is obviously not private because it reveals the information of the transaction and also requires a lot of time.

On the other hand, a payment network would have a separate route between the trading parties, so the transaction would take place in an instant because they do not need the blocks to reach a consensus. However, these transactions would not be published in the blockchain. When the channel is closed, the network takes into account the payment history and divides the balance with its respective accounts. Only the final balance is added to the blockchain.

Basically, Interstellar is doing a good job and improving it, as it plans to extend the Starlight project to Stellar’s integrated multi-hop payments through the new payment channels developed. Starlight also plans to make its payment channels compatible with other payment networks such as Interledger.

Protocol Architect, said Daniel Robinson,

“Starlight payment channels are identical to Bitcoin payment channels used in Lightning Network.”

For the moment, the revision only supports two-way channels. i.e. channels with exactly two people and has an integrated wallet and Starlight payment software. Starlight will initially run on the test network until all errors are resolved.

Robinson continued to talk about the starlight and said:

“It only allows Lumen transactions (the Stellar native asset), and future releases will support all Stellar network assets.”

A Twitterati @georgewnaylor cited the use case of the Starlight project: