Issue #1032: An LDK implementation has been spotted in the wild
Bitcoin's 2nd layer is coming.
Here's something really cool to see, a Lightning Development Kit implementation in the wild from the Blue Wallet team. For those of you who need a refresher or may be completely unaware, the Lightning Development Kit (LDK) is a Lightning Network implementation written in Rust, which has been the focus of the Square Crypto team for some time now. The Square Crypto team officially launched LDK a few weeks ago and it seems like the Blue Wallet team moved quickly to build a wallet using the implementation.
WIP 🚧
— BlueWallet (@bluewalletio) July 13, 2021
Let us introduce our new Lightning implementation.
Powered by Lightning Dev Kit (LDK), a flexible Lightning implementation written in Rust.
In this demo we gonna look in to opening a channel from an offline and airgapped device with PSBT (singlesig/multisig).
🧵 1/5 pic.twitter.com/t1jFWJvjGo
- Synced via Electrum, sync takes seconds, even on low-bandwidth connections
— BlueWallet (@bluewalletio) July 13, 2021
- Use your own Electrum Server
- Routing is provided via API, no graph sync (optional)
- Create a channel with any node on the Lightning network, no limitations (to keep the network decentralized)
A few cool things about the LDK that are mentioned above are the ability to fund channels straight from hardware wallets using PSBTs, only needing a seed phrase to restore your Lightning wallet, and cross device wallet capabilities. These functionalities are incredible improvements to the security and UX of interacting with a Lightning wallet for individual users. On top of this, it seems like the design decision to build this in Rust, a very powerful programming language from what I'm told, has enabled material improvements to syncing the wallet.
It's still the early days of LDK in the wild but at first glance things seems pretty promising. As time goes on, it will be interesting to see how much traction LDK gets and how the multiple of Lightning Network implementations interact, complement, and/or compete with each other. Will the market coalesce around one or a few implementations or will each have its own place in the market for specific use cases? Time will tell.
Final thought...
Leg day is essential.
