Zigzag: Alpha release

Today we’re officially announcing alpha version of ZigZag, a crypto assets exchange platform based on the Lightning Network. ZigZag enables 10 second asset exchanges with no user registration required, and avoids the typical high blockchain fees by leveraging the power of payment channels.

So far it has been well received by community, and this pushes us to keep growing ZigZag!

We are looking for users to help start a testing blitz of the product. This includes but is of course by no means limited to: general feature feedback, GraphQL API implementation feedback, bug reports, UI/UX suggestions. Join us on Slack to share your thoughts!

Plans

Our vision for ZigZag is to enable a gradual shift from users currently experiencing a centralised exchange model for their asset transfers, to a decentralised model. In designing ZigZag we are looking to meet the growing needs & solve headaches for those exchanging crypto assets, and adjusting our plans accordingly.

In phase one: we focus on solving the problem of high fees and long wait time of cryptocurrency exchange, by applying payment channels. Also we will be focusing on: integration with lightning network wallets, increasing user base of connections to us with payment channel lightning nodes, security and stability of service.

In this phase the exchange of funds shall require the user to trust us to pass these funds onto the target/destination address. We aim to eliminate this trust in a later phase once the lightning atomic swaps are available (shout out to Conner Fromknecht, Lightning Labs) 🚀.

On second phase: we will be focusing on becoming Lightning Network payment provider and will be developing internal tools/mechanisms for managing the funds locked in the payment channels.

Also we are planning to allow external investors to earn money, by locking their funds in our payment channel provider, thereby partially solving the problem of channels capacity.

On the third phase: having a sufficient number of payment channels connected to us and tools for managing the payment channels, we want to focus on experimenting with atomic swaps, and elimination of trust required to us from users.

Of course we can only achieve this with your help! You can follow our public roadmap and vote on features. We may use number of votes as a guideline on which order to build things.

At the end we want to say thanks for all Lightning Network teams: lnd, c-lightning, eclair for their hard work. And also to Alex Bosworth, Jack Mallers and others for their work on developing Lightning Network ecosystem ❤️

Next Steps…

• If you find the article interesting, please come help test our alpha here. Feel free to join us on Slack, and tell us what we are doing right & wrong.
• If you are a wallet provider looking for a third party to integrate with, we would love to speak with you, please join our slack and introduce yourself in the “introduction” channel.
• If you are an individual developer interested in what we have built, or general interest in the space. Please send us a note on jobs@bitlum.io.
• If you’re an investor interesting in this space or what we have built, we would love to talk. We’re actively speaking with potential investors and seeking new opportunities to grow out ZigZag! Please don’t hesitate and say hello@bitlum.io.