Lightning Network Makes Another Important Step Towards Adoption

Lightning Labs, working on scaling and speeding up Bitcoin transactions, released its first Lightning Mobile App, “the first [Bitcoin] mainnet app on all major mobile and desktop platforms.”

Having already released the Lightning App on desktop, their official announcement states that the app is available on Bitcoin mainnet in alpha for iOS on Testflight and for Android on Google Play. The goal was to make the app accessible to new users by making it simple to use.

This is a noncustodial wallet primarily targeted at those who want to test spending and sending Lightning payments. It comes with a warning though that it’s very early technology and that there’s a risk for the user of losing all their funds. “While testing the current alpha version of the software, we advise users to not put more money in the app than they are willing to lose.” They recommend using USD 5 – USD 20 of BTC for testing.

The mobile apps, just like the desktop one, have “a fully functional Lighting Network node”, Lightning Labs says, and they are looking forward to feedback in order to improve the stability and performance beyond the alpha release.

In terms of security, private key stays in the user’s device, encrypted by a random password that is stored in the iOS Keychain, while the KeyStore is used to store encrypted secrets on disk for Androids, with more security features coming.

As previously reported, Lightning Network comes with its own challenges and solution.

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Read more: Top 10 Applications That Are Pushing Lightning Network Adoption