Major Milestone: The First Lightning Payment on Litecoin pays from Zurich to San Francisco

We’re excited to share a major milestone that recently took place regarding Blockstream’s Lightning implementation. Christian Decker of Blockstream made the first full, secure Lightning payment on a non-test network, and the first Lightning payment on Litecoin, sending a microscopic payment not normally possible or economic on a blockchain, fully settled in a fraction of a second.

Christian patched the Blockstream Lightning implementation to work on Litecoin, and two hours after Segregated Witness activated on Litecoin, he opened a Lightning channel between lightning clients in Zurich and San Francisco worth about 1.3 US cents.

Once the channel was set up, he transferred 0.00000001 LTC (1 litecoin-satoshi) in under a second. Further test involved another Zurich->SF payment of 1000 litecoin-satoshi, then a return of the original 1 to Zurich: once a channel is open, an almost-infinite number of further transactions are fast and trivially easy.

Blockstream’s work on the Lightning protocol began two years ago with the intention of enabling new applications and developing new use cases that could help further the adoption of Bitcoin and related technologies Following the activation of Segregated Witness by the Litecoin community, we were excited by the opportunity to test our Lightning specification against a network similar in design to Bitcoin’s own. The outcome only reinforces our confidence that our implementation is well on track to bring fast, reliable, small payments to the world of Bitcoin.

This work is based on the open standard for Lightning which is nearing completion, and contributions from our friends and collaborators made this milestone possible: we especially want to thank the dedication of Laolu of Lightning Labs, Fabrice and Pierre of ACINQ, and of course Joseph and Tadge for starting the whole thing!

You can find a video of the transfer here:

You can learn more about Lightning here.