Announcing our first Lightning mainnet release, lnd 0.4-beta!
Today, we at Lightning Labs are announcing the release of lnd 0.4-beta! This release marks the 4th major release of lnd and the first Lightning mainnet beta, an important milestone. With this release, lnd has gained a considerable feature set, deeper cross-implementation compatibility, a new specialized wallet seed, comprehensive fault-tolerance logic, a multitude of bug fixes, and much more! This release is also the first release of lnd that has the option to run on Bitcoin’s mainnet, with the safety, security, and reliability features necessary for real-world, real money usage.
Connecting Blockchains: Instant Cross-Chain Transactions On Lightning
Since the activation of segwit, there’s been a renewed excitement around the idea of cross-chain atomic swaps. Up until a few days ago, some old school swaps were set up to trade 1000 Bitcoin, approximately $8M, for a now-defunct altcoin, and a handful of atomic swaps have been successfully performed involving notable segwit-enabled chains. Today, Lightning Labs is excited to announce that we have successfully tested the first Lightning cross-chain atomic swap between the Bitcoin and Litecoin testnets!
Announcing Our Lightning Desktop App, Now Available for Testing
Today, we're thrilled to be releasing a new cross-platform demo Desktop App for lnd. The release of this new demo wallet kicks-off a two-week "testing blitz" during which we hope Lightning users with a technical inclination can start testing the wallet, giving feedback, filing bugs, etc. You can download the Lightning Desktop App from our official release on Github!