Lightning Labs Raises $70M to Bring Stablecoins to Bitcoin

Lightning Labs, a start-up that’s building technology to make it easier to use bitcoin, has raised $70 million in a new funding round. The new funding, which was led by investor Peter Thiel, will be used to help the company develop its technology and bring its products to market.

Lightning Labs is working on a number of different projects, but its main focus is on building a system that would allow users to send and receive digital currency without having to wait for confirmations from the network.

This would make it possible to use bitcoin for small, everyday transactions, which is not possible with the current system.

Lightning” that would allow for faster and more efficient payments on the Bitcoin network. The idea is that by using Lightning, users would be able to send payments that are settled instantly and with much lower fees than is currently possible with Bitcoin.

Lightning Labs is also working on a product called “lnd,” which is a Lightning-enabled Bitcoin wallet that is designed to be easy.

This latest infusion of capital will help Lightning Labs scale its operations and continue its mission of bringing stability to the cryptocurrency markets.

How it works?

Lightning Labs describes Taro an asset overlay network on Bitcoin. The security of Taro is based on embedded consensus, which means that transactions on Taro include Bitcoin data that needs to be verified on the Bitcoin blockchain.
There are additional rules to govern that data as defined by the Taro protocol, similar to how LN is an overlay network that uses Bitcoin smart contracts but has its own set of rules to enable the instantaneous transfer of bitcoin (BTC).
Most importantly, Lightning Labs released the technical specifications for Taro as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) so that the protocol can be built with feedback from the broader developer community.

While Taro might become available first on lnd, Lightning Labs’ implementation of LN, its status as an open-source protocol will allow other popular LN implementations, like ACINQ’s eclair or Block stream’s Core Lightning, to use Taro.

During the interview, Stark pointed to this as a critical aspect of Taro. When Lightning Labs announced its Series A in 2020, she wrote that we were “entering the decade of Lightning.” Two years into that decade, she said Lightning Labs remains committed to being open source.

A critical distinction between Taro and other Stablecoins, like UST on Terra, is that Taro is only the infrastructure to enable the movement of assets over Lightning, be they Stablecoins or some other asset.

Taro is not a Stablecoins, collateralized, algorithmic or otherwise, it is simply infrastructure to enable the movement of assets. Developers still need to build projects using Taro.

This is just the beginning. With Lightning Labs raising $70M to bring Stablecoins to Bitcoin, we can expect even more innovation and adoption of cryptocurrency in the coming years.

This is a huge step forward for the industry, and it will help to bring even more legitimacy to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We can only hope that this new funding will help to bring even more stability to the market, and that it will help to increase the adoption of cryptocurrency around the world.