Following the ambitious plans presented in the road map earlier this year, Stellar's non-profit organization Stellar Development Foundation, which is behind the Creep currency, published an official specification. It describes how and when it plans to implement Lightning technology, which was originally developed for bitcoin.
The release of the specification is an important and expected step, as the co-founder of the Stellar Development Foundation and the company's technical director Jeb McCaleb first talked about plans to implement Lightning in 2015.
McCaleb notes:
Scalability is one of our main priorities for the next year. Hype has a tendency to outpace the reality in the space of the blockade. Technology can not yet realize what people want today.
McCaleb underscores that Stellar's partners insist on this type of scalability, and this exerts pressure.
When the etherium has experienced problems with scalability, the mobile messenger Kik chose Stellar instead. However, McCaleb acknowledges that if Kik wants to conduct all of its transactions in Stellar, the platform will not cope with this load.
In addition, the partner of the IBM platform has "ambitious plans for banks to use the network," which will require the scaling of Stellar, and SatoshiPay and other new projects are also interested in greater scalability. McCaleb says:
We know that if they used Stellar at the desired scale, the platform would have to do its best. Before so many people start using the platform, they need to prepare.
And there are signs that Lightning will help solve the problem.
The announcement was made a few days after the start-up Lightning Labs released the first Lightning software in the main bitcoin network. Although bitcoin took years to do this, McCaleb believes that Stellar will be able to implement the technology more quickly:
Now that the technology is running at bitcoin, we will move faster.
This does not mean that the integration of Lightning with Stellar will be simple. Developers can not simply transfer the code that runs in bitcoin. Rather, they have already prepared their own unique version. One of the developers was Jeremy Rubin, who for several years was actively involved in the implementation of technology in the sites of bitcoin.
By April 1, Stellar plans to launch the first versions in the test network, and the full implementation for real payments promises to fall. McCaleb underscores that the team is waiting for feedback from developers and researchers in the community and will not "throw technology over the fence," that is, how it will be tested.
And what will happen next is another story.
nice. I hope they do well