IOV Labs Takes on Lightning Network With New Light Client

IOV Labs, which builds platforms secured by bitcoin’s hashrate, launched Wednesday a light client for the Lumino Payments Network, its smart contract-compatible rival to the Lightning network

Lumino Light Client will run on mobile devices via integrated wallet apps, according to the Gibraltar-based firm.

Light Client comes nearly a year after the firm formerly known as RIF Labs unveiled Lumino. Based on IOV Labs subsidiary RSK’s Rootstock sidechain, Lumino secures smart contracts and ERC-20 compliant tokens via the Bitcoin network in what IOV Labs called a “layer three solution.”

Before Lumino, Gabriel Kurman, an RIF strategist, said 10 full nodes and three “hubs” – nodes that communicate with light clients but do not manage any private keys – comprised the Lumino Network for a processing power of about 100 transactions per second (tps). That’s faster than the bitcoin mainchain (about 3.6 tps by the seven-day average) slower than Visa (65,000 tps capacity) and well below what IOV Labs claims Lumino can scale to: 20,000 tps.

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“All the focus now is in bootstrapping the network, and the more nodes, channels and hubs we have the more transactions can be processed in the network as a whole,” Kurman said.

For now, IOV is assuming Light Client will be Lumino's most critical user gateway, “as we expect 99% of the users access it via a mobile Light Client,” Kurman said.

IOV is also attuned to crypto users' increasing appetite for stablecoins.

“Given the growing ecosystem of decentralized stablecoins being launched on RSK & Lumino, such as DollarOnChain (Bitcoin-backed collateralized Dollar), RIFDollar (RDOC), there is a great opportunity for wallets to enable off-chain nanopayments,” Kurman said.