Open source is an essential piece of Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Our Bitcoin-focused team loves open-source, and we want to give back to the open-source realm. So, every other Friday, the Voltage crew spends the day working on whatever open source projects they choose, as our CEO Graham explained in an earlier blog post.
Here’s what the crew worked on this week.
Engineer Sam has been working on a program using the LND API for creating custom macaroons. Macaroons are used for LND as credentials for allowing users to access certain features. It’s possible to "bake" macaroons that can only access certain LND services. Sam made an easy interface using LND's BakeMacaroon API, so a user can just type the service name and the API name that they want the macaroon to be able to access.
Frontend engineer Paul has been working on a Rust client cli for a Voltage node that users can interact with their Voltage node.
Engineer Alex worked on setting up the Postgres database in k8s for our new channel opener feature, which is now live! It launched last week, offering an easy, one-click way for users running Voltage nodes to receive inbound liquidity.
VP of Engineering Justin worked on a testnet faucet server, which uses the Bitcoin Rust library under the hood. Developers can send requests to it and receive testnet coins. He said this was one of the few FossFridays he wasn't banging his head against the wall trying to get it to work. "I like when software works," he said.
Frontend engineer Brandon kept working on his stream sats project from the previous FossFriday, where users can pay Lightning sats to pay for and unlock videos. The project was working locally, but he's been trying to deploy it on Netlify so the wider world can start using the app too. Using lnbits, he's been working on moving it from a custodial setup (using lnurl), to one that connects directly to his node. He'd like to get it to the point where users can connect directly to their nodes!
UI/UX designer Nick put together design for a mobile Lightning wallet app for Voltage, coming away with these spiffy designs:
Voltage's upcoming offering is the Surge dashboard, which can allow node runners to view their node data, from channels, to invoices, across time. Engineer Bob explored what it would look like to get Surge working without sharing any of the data with Voltage, for more privacy-conscious users. For now, he's working on boxing up all the necessary pieces in Docker.
Engineer Alyssa continued working on her project to allow watchtowers (lightning security services that protect users from theft) to accept lightning payments for providing security services. She needed to do some refactoring of the Aperture library to make its lsat implementation play nice with the LND watchtower.
