Lightning Protocol 1.0: Compatibility Achieved ✅

2 min readDec 6, 2017

As developers of the Lightning Network protocol, we’re excited to announce version 1.0 RC of the Lightning protocol specification along with a successful cross-implementation test on Bitcoin mainnet!

The 1.0 release of the Lightning protocol is an important step in our work toward standardization that started over a year ago in Milan. The Lightning specification was developed by our three teams (ACINQ, Blockstream, and Lightning Labs) and others in the bitcoin community through an open, collaborative process.

In parallel with our interoperability work, our three teams also developed their own Lightning implementations with a focus on cross-compatibility. Interoperability enables a single Lightning Network where payments are seamlessly routed without being isolated or incompatible. We have developed a comprehensive set of integration tests, and all tests are passing!

Today we’re also announcing the world’s first Lightning payments on the Bitcoin mainnet across all three implementations. These tests are the first multihop Lightning payments using real Bitcoin.

We tested eclair (ACINQ), c-lightning (Blockstream), and lnd (Lightning Labs). We spun up nodes distributed around the world, including Asia, Europe, South America, and North America. For our first test, we used the coffee shop Starblocks as our example eclair application. It accepted an incoming payment in bitcoin from a customer paying with the lnd Lightning app as the client, and was routed through c-lightning. Mmm, blockaccino! :)

For our second test, we made a payment from eclair to yalls.org, an article micropayment site on lnd, routed through c-lightning. This highlights another anticipated use case for Lightning: the ability to send instant, small value payments.

We’d like to thank the members of the community who have pitched in so far to help in the collaborative effort to test and build Lightning. Each team is working diligently toward mainnet beta releases for their implementations with a focus on stability and security.

As we move towards a final 1.0 version of the specification, we invite the broader community to provide peer review and feedback. We look forward to continue working together to build the future of Layer 2 scalability technology!