tomo 
Lightning Network News Episode II
Here’s a roundup of updates on our community node and worldwide.
Bitcoin Saigon LN Node:
- Bitcoin Saigon Node has been upgraded to LND 0.9 → 1st step to enable Lightning Loop for the community node in order to allow for simpler and cheaper channel capacity management
[We continue to be thankful to the work done by Albert of Neutronpay and Tomo of BitcoinVN who are volunteering their free time to build out this infrastructure for our community]
General Lightning Network ecosystem news:
- Pantera-backed Sparkswap shutting down; code remains open source → “Unfortunately, we weren’t able to build a large enough audience to sustain the business over the long term. (…) As a result, we’re shutting down the Sparkswap product and service. Effective today, we won’t be accepting any further user sign-ups or additional USD deposits. Existing users will have until March 24, 2020 to make any final BTC purchases before we terminate all trading activity. We plan to retire our Lightning node by the end of the March. And while we won’t be able to carry the torch forward, most of the code that we’ve written to build our products has been and will remain open source, so we hope that others can learn from and build on our approach.”
- Security Researchers: Lightning Network increasingly centralized → “ Originally designed to allow for cheaper and faster transactions without sacrificing the key feature of Bitcoin, i.e. its decentralisation, it is evolving towards an increasingly centralised architecture, as our analysis reveals a process having the undesirable consequence of making the BLN increasingly fragile towards attacks and failures” More details also here: https://twitter.com/Snyke/status/1228736422565249024
Fold App saw a huge surge in demand last month
- Fold App & Zap Wallet see overwhelming surge in demand amidst Coronavirus crisis “Strike by Zap, a lightning implementation currently running in beta, nearly shut down after its payments increased beyond expectation. Jack Mallers, Zap CEO, said the wallet “crushed its all-time-highs last week,” after processing over a bitcoin’s worth of transactions. (…) Fold, another crypto payments startup with lightning integrations, has experienced inventory issues since February, Will Reeves, Fold CEO, said. ‘Most of the activity has been focused on prepping.’ “
[We would like to express our continued gratitude to our Lightning Network Community Node sponsors BitcoinVN, future.travel and Neutronpay who helped us to fund the infrastructure and initial capacity to launch our node! If you would like to become a Bitcoin Saigon Lightning Node sponsor as well, feel free to reach out to us via one of our Social Media channels or hit us up at the next meetup!]
*If you would like to support the work of the Bitcoin Saigon Community - you can donate some of your Sats to us via our Donation page! *
Interviewing David Bailey of Bitcoin Magazine / Bitcoin2020