The Bitfury Group, a leading full-service blockchain technology company, announced that its developers have successfully tested the Lightning Network on the main Bitcoin network.
Committed to the success of the Lightning Network and the wider Bitcoin ecosystem, Bitfury engineers have been conducting research and carrying out tests to perform Lightning transactions using the current Bitcoin protocol.
After much research, the Bitfury team succeeded in sending a real-time bitcoin transaction on the Lightning Network, which can be seen in a video demo.
Valery Vavilov, CEO of The Bitfury Group said:
“This is a major accomplishment by our technical team and an important step forward for the Lightning Network and the growth of Bitcoin.”
“The Lightning Network has the potential to solve Bitcoin’s scalability issue and provide instant payment functionality. By demonstrating that the Lightning Network can function now, Bitfury has cleared the way to increased transaction processing and further adoption of Bitcoin.”
For more than a year, Bitfury has been supporting the development and implementation of the Lightning Network. In July 2016, Bitfury released a white paper in collaboration with the Lightning Network team detailing the specifications for Flare, an algorithm developed to improve payment routing in the Lightning Network.
In September 2016, the Flare algorithm was successfully implemented and tested by ACINQ. Back in May, Bitfury successfully tested a Litecoin payment using its Lightning Network interface.
The Transaction
The software written by Bitfury developers is based on the LND protocol being developed by Lightning Labs. The link to Bitfury’s modified version can be viewed here.
The setup of the transaction involved three LND nodes, in which two nodes were connected to the third one by payment channels. To carry out the transaction, Bitfury developers first opened the payment channels.
Hashes of the funding transactions, which can be viewed in any Bitcoin explorer, are:
d8dc019280a8531fdcf26e350874fe3100c06925306f002d85c943d9c215609e
8a4bf5481b12ee572639454939bef0d5e5b1a92bb3892db431ebb88f944e3f90
After opening the channels, Bitfury developers could make an indefinite number of transactions between the three nodes without fees, but made just two: one single-hop transaction and one
multi-hop transaction.
After completing the transactions, developers settled the payment channels by broadcasting the closing transactions on the Bitcoin Blockchain.
Hashes of the closing transactions are:
5e1ddeb8ebdc1a8603e6294546858da3e432af532f2b71ba0fc2214a9ecafd0c
00843a49178ba5304d1940945312d66e066dc59f96a006d04c21adbb4f074656