⚡Funding, Lightning summer highlights, reading, and much more!

Welcome to the 10th issue of this newsletter which covers market trends, Lightning Network developments and updates about LN Markets.

If you enjoy this content, feel free to spread the word!

🍶 Funding

As some of you may know, LN Markets enables traders to instantly stream their funds and execute trades directly from or to their digital wallets.

With no constraint of slow and complex fund transfers, a new generation of financial products becomes possible.

In order to drive the project forward, we are quite pleased to share that we have raised a pre-seed round with some of the strongest Lightning Network advocates in the crypto space:

• Bitfinex, the earliest major exchange to offer margin trading and the first to have implemented Lightning Network deposit and withdrawals in November 2019

• Fulgur Ventures, a Lightning fund committed to the growth of the ecosystem through funding, grants, sponsorship, and research (here on a topic that we particularly like)

• Arcane Crypto, which develops and invests in Bitcoin projects with the aim to strengthen the European Lightning ecosystem, and is about to get listed on Nasdaq First North in Stockholm

We are very happy with this group of investors as they have a deep understanding of the space and can add massive value to our company. With their investment and backing we will be able to accelerate our development and offer new trading experiences to our users.

Bitcoin is both a financial asset and a very powerful financial infrastructure and we intend to develop both aspects of it!

Now back to building, and more details on that very soon!

🤓 Lightning summer highlights

ACINQ released a new version of their top-notch Lightning wallet Phoenix with support for LNURL-auth. And we had the nice surprise to find out that the team did a video demo of decentralized authentication on LN Markets ⚡

After Eclair and c-lightning earlier in 2020, the latest LND release has lifted channel limits! Due to the alpha nature of the Lightning Network, the amount of BTC that we could hold in a channel was initially limited to 0.16 BTC. Now, most Lightning users can now send larger bitcoin amounts (through “Wumbo channels”), which we see as a very positive signal for the whole ecosystem.

For those still wondering about the origins of the term “Wumbo”, Lightning developer ZmnSCPxj explained it in 2018, in the Lightning Dev mailing list:

For a comprehensive audio recap on the state of the Lightning Network, we suggest Stephan Livera’s podcast with Olaoluwa Osuntokun, Lightning Labs CTO. Though we had heard that Olaoluwa spoke really fast, we didn’t expect him to speak THAT fast: feel free to listen at 0.5X speed like we did 😎

Finally, true DeFi may be on its way, and it’s built on Bitcoin! More info on DLCs here.

🔮 Reading: margin trading in CeFi & DeFi

Margin trading is what we offer on LN Markets. So when Su Zhu shares his views on margin trading for both centralized and decentralized exchanges, we read the man!

‘If the trend of users migrating to DeFi continues, it is possible to imagine that soon DeFi spot markets are on par with or more liquid than CeFi ones. Then margin traders may see DeFi margin trading as an increasingly viable alternative to CeFi–which in turn may compel CeFi exchanges to add DeFi liquidity into their own financial markets. Under this world, disparate CeFi markets become spokes to connect to DeFi underlying markets and users can decide which level they ultimately prefer for interacting with liquidity.’

✉️ The Lightning Lab

A newsletter which recommends another newsletter. This is not the plot of the next Nolan movie. Lightning Labs has launched a newsletter which covers their latest features and the whole ecosystem, definitely our pick for high quality Lightning content! Subscribe here:

⚡ Bonus

⚠️ the following tweet may backfire:

DeFi bros may trash talk the Lightning Network, but we are happy to stay humble and watch the steady growth of the network. New record for Total Value Locked in the network!

And finally, remember that feeling when you opened your first iPod? The River Financial onboarding package looks just as cool.. So fresh to receive an authentic ten billion Zimbabwean dollar note!

Please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter and Telegram.

Thank you all for the support and let’s keep building a BILLION sats company together!