Our Investment in Lightning Labs

We are excited to announce that Proof of Capital has partnered with Lightning Labs in their $10M Series A financing round along with Craft Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Jack Dorsey, among many other notable angel investors.

Lightning Labs is the leader in financial infrastructure for fast & scalable payments on top of Bitcoin. We are very excited to partner up with Elizabeth Stark, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, and their highly experienced team of developers and product leaders from Google, MIT CSAIL, and BitTorrent.

Elizabeth is described as a “Bitcon warrior, who now commands an army of elite developers” and that tile is truly fitting. Elizabeth convinced Olaoluwa to leave Google and become one of Bitcoin’s most prolific developers and turning Jack Dorsey into a Bitcoin & Lightning believer. For new platforms its critically important to bootstrap a community of developers and Elizabeth and the team are the best examples of this.

Outside of the team, the three main things that got us really excited about Lightning is the developer community Lightning has built, their customer traction, and its importance in the financial ecosystem.

1) 4000+ Strong Developer Community

Developers are becoming the new core “customer” of the financial ecosystem, and Lightning Labs has built a vibrant and engaged developer community on its platform.

Lightning has 4,000 developers on the platform building lightning apps and integrations. While still in its infancy, Lightning already has 2x the number of developers vs. many traditional Fintech infrastructure platforms including Plaid.

The teams most recent Lightning Conference brought together over 500 developers for technical talks, demos, as well as more high-level discourse around building businesses on Lightning. I also had the pleasure of speaking at the conference with their community about the VC perspective of developers communities as well.

2) Traction — 11,000 Nodes and Growing

In terms of the network, Lightning grew from a test implementation to a production implementation with 11,000 nodes on the network and 35,000 channels between each of the nodes.

However more important than any network level stats are the number of Lightning companies starting, growing, and getting funded on top of the platform. A few examples include:

• Fold— Allows users to earn bitcoin-back rewards (via Lightning) for shopping at merchants including Amazon, Starbucks, Uber, and more.
• Sparkswap — Allows for the instant exhcange of fiat currency to Bitcoin via Lightning. Raised $3.5M from Initialized, Pantera, Foundation Capital, among others.
• Stak — Application that still in stealth but is allowing workers in emerging countries to earn micro-payments for micro-tasks via Lightning payments.
• Bitfinex — One of the top digital asset exchanges integrated with Lightning to allow for instant deposits within their exchange.

3) Lightning is Strategic to the Bitcoin Ecosystem

Very few companies have the respect and support of the Bitcoin development ecosystem as Lightning, to be able to attempt to achieve their mission. This is a huge structural advantage which cannot be easily copied by any other participants.

It’s an honor to back Elizabeth, Olaoluwa, and the whole Lightning Labs team on their journey to become the financial infrastructure of the future.

PS — If you’re interested in building the next generation financial infrastructure, Lightning Labs is hiring.