Lightning Labs is building infrastructure to enable near-instantaneous, low-cost global money transfers using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. The company developed Taro, a protocol designed to allow stablecoins to be transferred over Lightning, leveraging Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade from November 2021. Lightning Labs says Taro will enable developers to execute hundreds of thousands of transactions per second on Lightning versus about five transactions per second on Bitcoin’s base layer. Taro is intended to let unbanked individuals send and receive stablecoins that represent domestic fiat via mobile apps; Lightning Labs will provide the rails but will not issue the stablecoins itself. The company has begun soliciting developer feedback on Taro and plans to incorporate that input as it continues development. Financially, Lightning Labs raised a $70 million Series B and has raised $82.5 million in total to date; it has fewer than 30 employees. Lightning Labs is a San Francisco–based startup that builds Layer 2 infrastructure and services for the Bitcoin Lightning Network. Its core products include the LND protocol implementation (beta released in 2018), a mobile wallet launched in June 2019, and a paid liquidity-management service called Lightning Loop. Loop offers 'in' and 'out' functions to help merchants and exchanges manage channel liquidity and charges a small percentage of each full loop. The company positions itself as an infrastructure provider to other lightning startups and apps such as Fold, River Financial and Sphinx, which use LND. Lightning Labs has said it will focus on larger opt-in payment channels and Atomic Multi-Path Payments in 2020 and aims to offer batched lightning-native financial services by 2021. Financially, the company announced a $10 million Series A and previously raised a $2.5 million seed from notable backers including Jack Dorsey and Charlie Lee. Lightning Labs develops an implementation of the Lightning Network — a second-layer protocol that aims to enable instant, high-volume bitcoin and litecoin transactions without increasing blockchain block size. The company has released a beta of its open-source software that is currently developer-focused and desktop-only, with a mobile client planned. Its technology uses cryptographic proofs, time‑out safety measures and multi‑hop routing to remove counterparty risk and enable conditional, atomic payments. Lightning Labs is positioning the protocol to enable micropayments and broader currency use cases on the web. The team is seven people and reports more than 1,800 developers in its Slack channel and thousands of volunteers who helped test the alpha. Financially, the company has raised $2.5 million in seed funding to date from prominent investors.

Total raised

$83M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Apr 2022