Samson Mow is feeling very confident about the Lightning Network. While the Blockstream chief strategy officer seemingly spends most of his time posting travel pics on Twitter—he’s also a keen watcher of bitcoin, and in particular, the Lightning Network, aka the layer-two scaling solution.
In an exclusive interview with Decrypt, the long-time Bitcoin veteran told us why the underlying tech powering Lightning could be just as pivotal to help deliver better scalability to a whole host of tokenized digital assets out in the wild today, not just bitcoin.
“[I’m] very bullish on the lightning network” Mow said. At its core, the Lightning Network is a decentralized system for instant and high-volume Bitcoin micropayments—with payments as low as 1 satoshi (worth $0.0001)—being able to be confirmed for low, if any transaction fees.
Bitcoin transactions, on the other hand, can sometimes take an hour to be confirmed. The layer two scaling network, is regarded as one of the key ways Bitcoin will be able to support millions of payments and users per day.
There are two main ways to look at the project, says Mow. First, as a layer two scaling solution for the Bitcoin network, and second, as a standalone technology that can be leveraged by other blockchains or digital asset protocols. And he’s excited for “both its implications for Bitcoin and the technology itself for other applications."
Much like Bitcoin did itself, Mow said, “Lightning has to grow organically, there's no real way to jumpstart it artificially. People need to open up channels, lock up Bitcoins and start connecting with other nodes.”
And it appears that people are taking up the Network in droves. Last week, the number of nodes on the network hit the symbolic 10,000 mark, with network capacity now also at 816 bitcoin’s—or $6.8 million if the capacity is measured in US-dollars.
To put that in perspective, the network capacity is eight times larger than it was a year ago (worth $750,000 back then)–it hit a high of $12 million or 1,100 Bitcoins in July this year.
The growth of the Network “has been pretty spectacular given that it's only a year and a little bit old—it's still very, very early,” explained Mow.
However, he told us, “Lightning is going to become harder and harder to track its growth.”
