Acinq releases Eclair, a Lightning Network client with graphical explorer

The second development team to release a working version of a Lightning Network, Acinq, recently announced their lightning alpha client, Eclair 0.2-alpha1. Named after the french word for Lightning, the release includes a Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Acinq developers say that they have both coordinated with and competed against at least three other teams to produce a Lightning Network that helps Bitcoin scale to millions of users or more. The first working example of a Lightning Network client, an alpha version of the Lightning Network Daemon was released on Jan 10th, by the original architects of the network, Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja.

The Paris-based Acinq team states their goal is to build a cross-platform, full implementation of a lightning node. The alpha release allows anyone to open, fund, monetize, and close Bitcoin payment channels on the Bitcoin testnet, sending payments in both directions. According to the developers, the software has been tested with hundreds of nodes and integrations, but “is still far from the production-ready quality we want to achieve.”

Windows, Mac, and Linux users can download Eclair and take part in their test network. The one requirement is to have a running version of a recent Bitcoin node, “a synchronized, segwit-ready, non-pruning, tx-indexing Bitcoin-core node.”

Acinq states that the Eclair alpha client is the first implementation to achieve compliance with the Basis of Lightning Technology (BOLT). Various Lightning Network developers agreed on the set of standards last year, at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Milan. The resulting documents describe a layer-2 protocol for off-chain bitcoin transfer by mutual cooperation, relying on on-chain transactions for enforcement if necessary.

BOLTs ensure that the various implementations are interoperable, resulting in a seamless network. The meeting included developers from Acinq, Amiko Pay, Purse.io, Bitfury, Blockstream, and Lightning Labs. Acinq developers say that they have both coordinated with and competed against at least three other teams to produce their client.

The Acinq team has also been working on the first Lightning Network Explorer application, a way to track the global lighting network, the number of nodes, open channels, and total capacity of the network.

The alpha release of Eclair comes at a time of intense debate over how to scale Bitcoin. It has become clear that a number of Bitcoin miners have been boycotting a change to the Bitcoin protocol called Segregated Witness.

"If 2nd layer protocols become a reality, many bitcoin transactions will go through 2nd layer networks and not via miners,” Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu recently stated, “Miners won't receive transaction fees for them. The mining community obviously feel unhappy about this." Wu personally controls Antpool, which currently contributes almost 18 percent of the total Bitcoin hashrate.

Bitcoin Core developer and Blockstream employee Christian Decker states, “This is a very common misconception among people.” The Zurich-based engineer claims that, “Lightning does not reduce the fees that the miners may collect, it increases their reach into transactions that they could not otherwise serve.”

“With the (1) extension of Bitcoin's reach and (2) the higher than usual fees for setup and settlement, I'm absolutely convinced that miners will have a net gain when Lightning rolls out. Lightning is not cutting into the miner's profit, it opens up new possibilities.” - Christian Decker