Announcing Lightning Makers
TL;DR We have gathered a small community of developers/hackers/makers that build Lightning Network applications (lapps) focused on pushing Bitcoin’s adoption. Join the conversation: Telegram, Slack, Discord
So for the past year the number of early adopters working with Lightning Network (LN) has been increasing. It’s clear from lnd Slack alone that we have all types of people becoming interested in Lightning.
We have seen with the rise of lapps such as Satoshi’s Place that Lightning is growing beyond early adopters & protocol level developers. Satoshi’s Place users aren’t just Lightning users -they’re crypto fans / advocates/ and also early enthusiasts interested in lapps.
As this point it’s worth explaining lapps are basically lightning powered applications built on top of an LN implementation. A few implementations that are discussed and built upon in our community are LND, C-lightning, and ACINQ. Lightning Network applications package the raw protocol and allow people to take advantage of micropayments, instantaneous bitcoin transactions and near 0 fees.
I was at the recent Berlin hackday organised by Fulmo (Side note: Registration for the third #LightningHackday in Berlin on September 1st is open! https://lightninghackday.fulmo.org/ ). This event also echoed what we’ve seen we have very smart individuals & also people interested in building the next layer, some that aren’t devs at all and just interested in supporting these lapps.
While building Bitlum, we spoke to a number of developers building their own lapps that agree there needs to be a place dedicated to creating useable products on lightning. Our goal is to create an implementation agnostic group where people can get together to talk about building the future of lightning. Mainly people building services & products with Lightning to hang out, and discuss their products/startups. Think Lightning & Product hunt had a baby 🔥🔥🔥
After a few weeks we’ve managed to create a small group of such makers and have seen the group rise in membership & quality over the past few weeks.
Telegram has so far been the dominating platform with most new members coming here. It’s been fun seeing a number of different developers come together to share what they’re building, what success they’re having, what failures they’ve had, and generally just help pump their lapps!
We’ve seen members linking up & sharing their lapp with similar products, and explaining what feature sets they’re developing. Members have also been quick to provide support & feedback when new features drop onto products.
A major focus of the new applications being discussed are those focused on User Experience. Andreas A. spoke on this recently and his words are being heard. This is certainly something we’re hoping to help push in this community, we are here to promote a joint effort by developers and designers focused on making user-friendly and secure applications to help drive hyperbitcoinization.
Benefits to the makers:
- Shared community
- Higher viewership
- Free to post product/service links without concerns of banning from admin (Unless you drive us nuts with the spam links 😂)
- Finding other lapps looking to partner/integrate
Benefits to the end lapp user/enthusiasts:
- Not having to join separate lapp startup rooms / slacks/ discord
- Stay up to date with the best new releases/builds/developments across community
- Follow the ongoing developments & thoughts of the makers behind your favorite projects
What else do we want to do going forward?
- Opening up weekly maker calls. A weekly call for us to share success/failures and anything else we want to share about building our products 😎
- Reading Lists/Collection of guide information. We have started putting this together. The idea for such a learning space came from another group member Maurycy. One of our members Rene has just started creating an open wiki and we are looking for people to help curate the content which the group will contribute towards.
- Post build requests — I want this made, who will take it. We are making a space for this atm.
- Press — we hope to help drive new relationships between press & new makers.
- It’s early days but we’re hoping to include channels to help people with legal and fund raising as well — we have a few VCs joined already which is cool!
The goal here is to drive the adoption of Lightning, and together maybe we’re stronger than separate entity community efforts. We experienced this with Bitlum that it’s so early in this space, getting a large community under 1 brand seems to be a hard slog. Bringing everyone together to cross promote products/services for the benefit of the whole community seems to be a much faster way to push Lightning & Bitcoin’s adoption.
So that’s basically it. Maybe it will work. Maybe it will die…come join lets find out together if this works :D
Thanks to Brandon, Afnan, Andrew for their help pushing this idea & help proofing this post.
