Electrum Wallet introduces Lightning Payments.

Electrum, one of the oldest Bitcoin/Litecoin wallets, will soon support Lightning Network payments. Coindesk caught up with Electrum’s founder, Thomas Voegtlin, at the BIP001 blockchain event in Odessa, Ukraine, where he revealed what he and his team are working on, and while he wasn’t shy about revealing a launch date, he suggested that the company is now ‘close’ to an official public launch.

“We’ve been working on this for about a year on a separate branch on GitHub, and we’ve reached a point where we’re ready to merge it with the master branch. This will roll out over the next few weeks until the end of July, meaning Lightning support will be available in the next major release.”

During the conversation, Voegtlin shared additional development insights, including the fact that Electrum will not leverage the existing Lightning client. Instead, the team has been quietly developing its own implementation. The next release is said to be similar to ACINQ’s eclair, a hybrid on-chain/layer 2 Bitcoin wallet with mainnet and testnet support for Android devices. With Electrum joining the game, there are now four implementations of the Lightning network, including Lightning Labs (LND) and C Lightning (Blockstream).

Like Eclair, both use the Electrum server to connect to the Bitcoin network, but they do not use it for Lightning payments, declaring on github that ‘the client itself will act as a Lightning node’. However, it doesn’t keep you connected 24/7. Lightweight client. The team has taken another step toward its goal of helping the network scale and allowing users to maintain sovereignty over their coins.

“We want to give users control over their funds.” —Thomas Voegtlin

The Litecoin version, ‘Electrum-LTC’, is maintained by ‘Pooler’ who creates the third largest Litecoin mining pool with a network hashrate of just over 12%. When asked about his thoughts on the transfer, Fuller responded:

“But we hope that eventually Electrum-LTC will support this feature. It all depends on how much tweaking and testing I need to do to get a product that works on Litecoin, and how much time I have available.”

Electrum is a completely open source wallet. This means that anyone can review the code or contribute to the project through the official github repository (Litecoin repository). Since 2011, over 230 people have contributed in some form, and the project has since expanded to support Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Android systems.