Lightning Labs, the blockchain development company behind the Bitcoin Lightning Network, has announced the launch of a marketplace. The marketplace enables Lightning users to buy and sell access to channel liquidity. The Lightning Network was designed to provide a scaling solution for Bitcoin, by adding another layer to the Bitcoin blockchain, enabling faster and cheaper payments.
According to a press release, the marketplace, called Lightning Pool, is “a non-custodial, peer-to-peer marketplace for Lightning node operators to buy and sell channels”, making it easier to instantly accept Lightning payments, and will open up a new possibility of earning a yield on bitcoin by selling access to liquidity on Lightning.
Announcing Lightning Pool, a non-custodial marketplace to buy and sell #bitcoin liquidity on Lightning.
With Pool, users can trade channels, making it easy to get access to liquidity or earn a bitcoin-native yield. 💱
Learn more and start trading today:https://t.co/tOe7xs6Rac
— Lightning Labs⚡️🌐 (@lightning) November 2, 2020
The new marketplace was developed to address the general lack of liquidity on the Lightning Network. Lightning Pool will provide users managing multiple channels with the ability to buy liquidity from the marketplace when they need it. Lightning Pool ensures that Lightning Network node operators will be consistently compensated for their cost of capital, by offering it up as liquidity.
To begin with, Lightning Pool channels will have a fixed two-week duration. As Lightning Pool grows, however, Lightning Labs plans to add additional markets with other durations. At the moment, account sizes are also limited to 10 BTC, but this will likely increase as more confidence is gained in the system.
Feature image by schneider-lein from flickr
