BitMari Launches Lightning Node to support Bitcoin Blockchain
The lightning network is a second layer payment protocol that operates on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s one of the solutions put forward to solve the bitcoin scalability problem. This refers to a limitation of the amount of transactions the bitcoin network can process.
It currently has an average block creation time of 10 min and a block size limit of 1 MB as a result, managing only 3 to 7 transactions per second. With more demand for transactions coupled with a stagnating transaction processing capacity, fees for sending bitcoin has surged.
With the Lightning Network enabling cheap off-chain micro-payments, BitMari users can benefit from reduced network fees with this implementation.
BitMari set up a lightning node using the Lightning Network Daemon (LND) implementation. This is one of three lightning implementations. The other two are C-Lightning and Eclair.
Our LND node is comprised of a full bitcoin node (btcd implementation) and the LND infrastructure itself. For btcd, we used a fork by the developer Roasbeef that includes support for segwit and neutrino required by LND. As of writing this, btcd has since implemented segwit.
A large portion of the time involved in setting up our lightning node was with syncing the blockchain data which is well over 200GB. This process can take up to seven days depending on the processing speed of your server/computer.
If you’re new to the Lightning Network mainnet or just want to open more channels, you can open one up with us using the BitMari URI:
0296bdf95048ea0f4e7828e69f1c0eca44ae236e1fc7b2445706697a6044a52a71@159.89.253.155:9735
For developers looking to set up a lightning node. The following resources should come in handy:
- Lightning Network Daemon (LND)
- Btcd fork (Roasbeef)
- Improved LND install documentation
- BitMari’s Lightning Explorer
- BitMari Slack
BitHub Africa has a blow by blow tutorial on how to setup a Lightning node here.
BitMari is looking for other Lightning nodes to connect to our node, feel free to contact us with our details below:
BitMari Team
info@bitmari.com
