Electrum Wallet Adds Support For Bitcoin’s Lighting Network

One of the most popular wallet services, the Electrum Wallet, has been a major topic on many best cryptocurrency news sites for adding support for Bitcoin’s lighting network.

The popular wallet and its founder, Thomas Voegtlin, spoke to media outlets from the BIP001 blockchain event in Odessa (Ukraine) and showed that work is being done on the solution – and that sending lighting transactions with the Electrum wallet is now close to its official release.

I am Thomas Voegtlin, creator of Electrum. Ask Me Anything now: https://t.co/ssoP0nujvP

— Electrum (@ElectrumWallet) November 17, 2015

However, the boss of the Electrum wallet declined to reveal a specific release date. As the latest cryptocurrency news show, he only said the following:

“We’ve been doing this work for about a year in a separate branch [on GitHub] and we’ve reached the point when we are ready to merge it with our master branch. This is going to happen in the coming weeks until the end of July, and it means that the next major release will have lightning support.”

During the event, the CEO of the wallet service also showed a test version of the wallet on his mobile phone. As he revealed, the lighting network is an in-development “layer 2” scaling technology which is aimed to enable faster payments as well as lower fees and greater transaction throughput than the Bitcoin network can directly offer.

The head of Electrum wallet, however, also noted that Electrum chose not to integrate with the existing lighting clients and instead started developing its own implementation.

“We want to give users control over their funds,” Voeglin was confident.

As it is described right now, the product will be similar to the one of Eclair (another lighting wallet) which itself uses the Electrum servers to interact with the Bitcoin network. Similar to this, Electrum uses its servers for Bitcoin transactions but it won’t do that for the interaction with the lighting network, as Voegtlin noted.

Meanwhile, the Bitcoin hash rate has hit an all time high a couple of days ago. The news were reported on many Bitcoin and altcoin news sites as a new milestone which will keep the BTC network pushing and hopefully bring in more traders and miners.