On 4th April debuted the wallet ACINQ’s Éclair. The Lightning Network (LN) earned its first user mobile app for ACINQ’s Éclair wallet.
MORE CONSUMERS, MORE PRODUCTS
The rapid development of Lightning made possible to download it from Google Playstore. The wallet is now available for Android, version 5.0 of the operating system or an upgraded version.
The launch of this wallet means the first mainnet mobile wallet which founds on the increasingly popular protocol.
“The Eclair Wallet is a next generation, Lightning-ready Bitcoin wallet. It can be used as a regular Bitcoin wallet. It can also connect to the Lightning Network for cheap and instant payments.” ACINQ declared in a description of its offering.
“This software is based upon eclair, and follows the Lightning Network standard.”
THE CHANGING FACE OF BITCOIN PAYMENTS
LN had a quick development since this year took place SegWit. SegWit, which had a mass adoption in February and March, was the necessary reason for technology to function properly on the Bitcoin mainnet.
Last week saw several new products entering the market. Several weeks ago, the first LN mainnet beta implementation successfully went live to considerable acclaim.
Reacting on social media, users appeared encouraging, nonetheless lobbying ACINQ for an iOS equivalent. This, commentators responded, could be no easy task due to coding requirements.
“Further criticism came from those wishing to both send and receive Lightning payments with Eclair, that functionality available by running a full node”, ACINQ said.
At press time, LN mainnet incorporated 1335 public nodes and 3729 open channels. Bitcoin has already benefited in terms of user experience from SegWit, with fees as low as 1 satoshi per byte now standard.
In future, LN should allow all Bitcoin users to send transactions near-instantly with fees amounting to fractions of a US cent.