Developers at MicroStrategy are working on solutions to onboard large numbers of people onto the Lightning network, says CEO Michael Saylor.
Speaking at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia, on Saturday, he touted Lightning as the most important thing going on in the world in technology. Saylor said MicroStrategy has some R&D projects going on right now. It’s working on enterprise applications of Lightning – enterprise Lightning wallet, enterprise Lightning servers, and enterprise authentication.
Saylor outlined that MicroStrategy is looking for solutions that would allow companies to roll out Lightning to a hundred thousand employees every day, or open Lightning wallets for 10 million customers overnight. It’s at an early stage and so yet to be seen whether any viable products would come out of this. Saylor has been an advocate of the Lightning Protocol, and has time and again reiterated his trust in the technology’s big future.
He said its advantage is not just about scaling up Bitcoin for billions of people or driving the transaction cost to nearly nothing. Saylor added the principle of Bitcoin is to go very carefully and not move fast on the base layer without the universal consensus. He shared that in Lightning, one can move much more aggressively in developing functionality and take more risks with the applications than one can with the underlying Bitcoin layer.
With the Lightning Protocol, users can open payment channels with each other and exchange multiple transactions before settling on-chain. This helps minimize fees and confirmation time – transactions in Bitcoin normally take 10 minutes or longer to be considered final.
