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 monkeying around with PeerSwap, a liquidity tool. He’s one of the few lnd users to use it so he’s been helping them debug issues lnd users face. He’s been discussing with the tool’s developers about what happens if lnd restarts mid-swap, for example.
Sam also recently got a Blockstream Jade hardware wallet. Users of the hardware wallet currently need to build updates to the firmware from scratch. But once Sam updated the firmware, the device stopped working. So he submitted an “issue” outlining the problem to the GitHub repository.
Engineer Alex was working on PLN, a new privacy-minded Lightning wallet, founded by Voltage frontend engineer Paul. Alex is putting together a Dockerfile for deployment.
UI/UX engineer Nick has been working on components and graphs for the upcoming launch of our product Surge, a dashboard that exposes historical data and graphs about a lightning node.
Founder and CEO Graham watched a video walkthrough presentation of the Fedimint code. Fedimint, as we’ve described in previous FossFriday summaries, is a new type of custodial bitcoin wallet. But it offers far more privacy than most custodian bitcoin wallets, and it decentralizes the custodial model by splitting up custodians into a federation.
Frontend engineer Brandon has been working on a video streaming website that takes Lightning payments. Micropayments are a useful use case for Lightning Network. Today’s financial system doesn’t allow for small digital payments due to transaction fees. Brandon explores a website where the video cost two satoshis for every five seconds of the video. (He demoed this on the Rick Roll video, but of course.) Behind the scenes, the project’s using WebLN, a standard for making lightning payments on the Web.
Engineer Alyssa has been continuing work on making it possible to send payments to a Lightning watchtower. Currently, she’s working on adding an option to send/accept LSATs between LNDs watchtower services. This week she did some research and finally started working on the code.
Stay tuned for more updates on the open source projects the Voltage team works on.
