Electrum is currently planning to upgrade the wallet with Lightning Network integration. This was made known by the owner Thomas Voegtlin, who is currently in Ukraine’s Odessa for a BIP001 Conference.
Forklog published this through their Telegram channel on Friday. Voegtlin, the CEO of Electrum stated that:
“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.”
To show that he was not bluffing about the upgrade, Voegtlin brought out his phone to demonstrate the test version of the wallet’s LN compliant Electrum. He noted that:
“We want to give users control over their funds,”
This top-level integration will make Electrum one of the major wallets to introduce Lightning Network to the public as the new technology is still developing.
Scaling Solution for Bitcoin
After becoming active last year, it is widely believed that Lightning Network will solve Bitcoin’s scaling issues since it is a second layer blockchain.
In addition to this feature, Lightning Network will lead to faster payments which eliminate transaction costs. It presently seems to works best for small transactions.
Lightning Network earned much publicity thanks to the owner of Twitter Jack Dorsey. Meanwhile, many platforms have tried using it but without much success due to lack of proper understanding mainly because it is best suited for advanced users and techies.
Lightning Network functions like Electrum’s Lightning wallet known as Éclair. Electrum CEO says that although Éclair utilizes its servers to connect with Bitcoin, Lightning Network doesn’t function this way.
