TLDR; A lot happened this year — this post aims to distill down the progress.
2020 has been a rather taxing year in every sense of the word, and we are all looking forward to a better 2021. But when it comes to the lightning ecosystem, the pace of progress didn’t halt. Lightning is considerably more robust and secure now than before. Fulgur ventures published a detailed overview on the state of lightning ecosystem — Infrastructure projects like Boltz along with #LiFi are the largest categories. It further consolidates our hope that slowly but surely, we are moving in the right direction. Ryan Gentry from Lightning labs tweeted a great year-in-review thread on lightning’s 2020 progress:
Without further ado, let us dive right into how the year has been for Boltz and what we hope to achieve in 2021. For the uninitiated, Boltz product offerings has two facets — First, we are a privacy first, account-free crypto exchange. And second, we are a LSP (Lightning service provider). Various apps like Breez, Thunderhub, and Electrum have integrated Boltz lightning services in their apps — which enabled a frictionless user experience for their end users. With the release of landmark features like on-the-fly channel creation swaps, we focused on LSP offering in the first half of 2020. The second half of of the year we worked hard on bringing more assets to the exchange side of Boltz offering. We added Tether(USDT) — which enabled our users to atomically swap USDT and lightning Bitcoin. While we grew together with the lightning ecosystem and learned a lot in the process, we have few more goodies to unwrap from our roadmap in coming months that we are excited to share with you guys:
- Ether Integration: We have now added support for Ether in the current Boltz release. You can hop on to https://boltz.exchange and swap your lightning Bitcoins with Ether and vice versa. The integration of second largest crypto by market capitalization will increase optionality for our users and as an exchange service, that’s one of our main value proposition.
- RTL Integration: This has been long in works and after months of efforts sorting out every single little detail — we are psyched to announce that next RTL release will feature an optional opt-in Boltz support. We’d like to thank Suheb and Shahana from the RTL team for escalating this RTL release. It further manifests what is possible when teams with shared values collaborate together.
- No Ether required to claim: For account-based chain like Ethereum, the luxury of being able to store the state on-chain means that we can build tools with better user experience. Our current architecture requires that user should already have some ether in their Metamask wallet to pay for miner fee when receiving Ether or USDT from a Boltz swap. During the swap process, Boltz client does a sanity check for if the wallet has enough Ether or not. We have been brainstorming better ways to tackle this, including small custodial invoice (worth $1 for instance) that the user can pay to cover the fee before the swap process resumes. This protocol will make swapping on Boltz an even more seamless experience.
- WalletConnect: Adding more Web3 providers is also something we are looking forward to in coming months. This would make swapping ETH and USDT on mobile phones easier.
- Support for c-lightning: Boltz is a lightning node implementation agnostic project and we plan to add support for c-lightning and Eclair down the line in our boltz-lnd cli tool. We hear our users are most excited for this so rest assured, we are sure to push this up on our priority list.
- Chain to Chain swaps: For Boltz to become a fully fledged digital asset exchange platform, it’s important that we do offer cross chain layer one swaps. Once shipped, Boltz would be a full blown viable alternative to current custodial exchanges like Shapeshift.
Did we miss anything? Would you like to suggest a feature that you’d like us to work on? Feel free to hop on our Discord. We are all ears.
We wish everyone a happy new year! Stay safe and happy swapping!
