Today we are releasing an early version of Eclair, the first implementation to achieve compliance with the Lightning Network Specifications. If you are a developer, we encourage you to test it out! We will publish a short video tutorial later this week.

OK, great, but what does it mean for me, the average non-technical Bitcoin user?

It means a lot, actually! But first, let’s give a brief status on us and the Lightning Network.

At ACINQ, we got interested in LN in the summer of 2015, and started hacking on our own implementation right away. Other implementations appeared around that time, such as: c-lightning, Thunder, and lnd. For about a year, there have been a lot of experimentations and discussions on various aspects of lightning, mainly occuring on the lighting-dev mailing list. For example, we got some press coverage last september for publishing test results of a routing prototype. This was all fine, but there was no clear way forward and implementations were not compatible.

A few months ago, at the last Scaling Bitcoin conference in Milan, implementers from different teams around the world sat together and agreed that interoperability was the key to obtain a single, valuable, global Lightning Network. That’s when we all started working on a specification for the Lightning Network (a.k.a the BOLTs). Since then we’ve had biweekly conference calls, and we are making rapid progress towards BOLT v1.0. Being a part of this joined effort has been incredibly exciting and challenging at the same time! Despite what is at stake, this collaboration happens in a constructive and friendly atmosphere, as Rusty Russell pointed out in a recent blog post.