About 9 months ago, I released a little prototype of an app named Lightning Spin.
Some people got excited about it since it was one of the first Lightning apps where you could experience instantly settled micro-transactions and withdrawals.
You could pay 6¢ for a single spin, (1 BTC was around $6,000 back then) and withdraw your winnings in seconds — something that would be impossible with the fiat system and would be increasingly difficult on Bitcoin’s base layer.
At the time, the Lightning Network was fairly small, with only about 25 BTC in network liquidity, and a lot of people didn’t understand the concept of channel balancing, which resulted in hundreds of support requests being generated. Still, people kept spinning, learning and getting their payouts through Lightning ⚡️
In 6 months, Lightning Spin was becoming one of the go-to Lapps where people would try out their new wallets and have fun playing with some of their sats.
The app hit 10,000 settled invoices through the Lightning Network, which would amount to something like 3 full blocks of bitcoin transactions.
With the release of more and more Lightning wallets, including Joule, which Lightning Spin was the first Lapp to integrate, the network kept growing and the disbelievers started believing.
I decided to sell the app to focus on other projects, mainly OpenNode, but also Lapps.co and some other Lapps that I currently have in the works.
By the time of the sale, the Lightning Spin wheel had been spun 120,000 times by 3,300+ different people.
From the beginning the goal was to create something that would allow anyone to experience the joy of lightning. It even managed to be many’s first Lightning transaction, getting me featured on multiple news articles and it sparked dozens of interesting conversations with fellow bitcoiners.
I had a blast starting and operating the website. I hope to see it grow in the hands of the new owner and I’m thankful to everyone that helped, played and shared it.
If you want to stay up to date on my future ventures, follow me on Twitter:
See you on the moon,
Rui
