The Hyperion fund has been following the project closely and we are pleased to update our community on their latest developments. During this period, Lightstreams published their roadmap. In the article, they quoted their mission as “to create a blockchain-based network for commercial applications, providing a quintessential solution to achieve greater scalability, responsiveness, and privacy.”

In this article, I will summarize some of the steps Lightstreams has taken to fulfil their objectives.

In accordance with their roadmap, Lightstreams’s network went live at the end of Q1 2019.

They managed to successfully launch their Ethereum-compatible blockchain network which was designed for speed and privacy. Being Ethereum-compatible allows applications running on Ethereum to run on Lightstreams and thus take advantage of its features — higher transaction throughput, faster confirmation times and the privacy features of their Smart Vault. The Smart Vault is perfect for selling or sharing digital content via programmed smart contracts on their decentralized network.

The team wants users to have more control over the data they share with applications. In order to encourage companies to use decentralized technology to facilitate compliance with regulations, the team at Lightstreams created a product called the Lightstreams Smart Vault that runs on the Lightstreams network. This product allows companies and developers to build decentralized applications without the need to store users’ personal data. The Smart Vault is something that is unique to Lightstreams with significant potential for projects building DApps.

Lightstreams’s lead developer, Lukas Lukac, published an interesting article on CoinMonk, describing why it would be beneficial and more secure for companies to use the Smart Vault solution.

Lightstreams was recently able to present their solution at the Decentralized Storage Summit during Blockchain Week in Berlin. The Summit was a great opportunity for the leading blockchain projects specializing in decentralized storage to come together and share their knowledge and learnings with their counterparts.

In May 2019, projects were able to start building applications on the Lightstreams Network. The team was proactive and published a number of great demo projects for others to utilize - July saw the completed distribution of tokens and the launch of the Photon token (PHT) on CoinAll exchange.

Lightstreams also partnered with Pocket to enable developers to easily connect to and set up new Lightstreams nodes on the Pocket network. The team behind Pocket is on a mission to enable developers to connect any application to any blockchain from any device. The partnership may benefit both developers and businesses building on Lightstreams and adds another layer of decentralization at the infrastructure level. You can find a more detailed explanation here.

The team at Lightstreams is constantly searching for partners that align with their vision and interests and will soon also be added as a network on the Portis Wallet. Portis is a platform for making decentralized applications accessible to mainstream users. It offers developers an SDK that they can integrate into their DApp to make it familiar and accessible, just like using a regular web app. Users can also purchase additional crypto straight to their wallet using their credit card. Finally, developers enjoy additional features to improve their DApp UX.

They are also constantly looking to improve and build upon their network. Lightstreams just recently added a new and innovative feature to their stack for gasless transactions. With this feature, users can begin interacting with any DApp, without requiring a balance of PHT or even a wallet (e.g. MetaMask). This gives users a chance to try out a DApp until a point at which they can then decide to pay to keep using the DApp or not.

These “free” transactions are called Meta Transactions and are funded via a Gas Station Network. The user signs the transaction, so the blockchain records their activity, but the gas fee is paid on their behalf by the application creator.

This is believed to be a game-changing feature for blockchain applications as a major barrier that is inhibiting user adoption is the requirement for users to have a funded wallet in order to begin trying out a DApp.

The Lightstreams blockchain has managed to achieve 50x the transaction speed of Ethereum and near-instant settlement time (3 seconds) in conjunction with enabling responsive DApps — we hope this will drive continued developer interest and adoption.

We will continue to monitor their progress and update the Hyperion community as they build out their vision and grow their community,

Kind regards,

Zulekha Cara and the Invictus Capital team