ACINQ
Introduction
ACINQ is a French start-up that develops products related to the Lightning Network. The objective of Lightning Network is to allow to make microtransactions with Bitcoins at low cost.
Team
Founded in 2014 and based in Paris, the team is composed of Pierre-Marie Padiou, Fabrice Drouin and Dominique Padiou.
Vision
Validating a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain takes about 10 minutes and the transaction fees are quite high. The much hoped-for large-scale adoption of Bitcoin is not feasible for a blockchain that cannot support more than 10 transactions per second.
Many Altcoins have been announced as the successors to Bitcoin, and they are capable of handling more transactions per second, as is the case with Bitcoin Cash. Another vision is to create an overlay to the existing Bitcoin network.
Introduced in 2015, Lightning Network connects two people who want to transact via commitment contracts called Hashed Time-Locked Contracts (HTLC). These allow two people to send funds to each other without them having to open a new payment channel because the transaction is securely and confidentially relayed through the other members of the network. As a result, the Lightning network allows for unlimited Bitcoin transactions to be processed for instant, low-cost payments. When the channel is closed, the funds are recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Financing
The fintech Acinq has just raised €7 million from the funds Idinvest, Serena and Bpifrance. This is a first for the public investment bank, which had so far made indirect investments in blockchain-related projects.
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A year earlier, this young company had already raised €1.4 million from Serena Capital and some business angels including Bertrand Diard (Talend), Sébastien Lucas (Oxalide) and Yves Weisselberger (Snapcar).
Products
ACINQ develops solutions that aim to demonstrate the potential of Bitcoin and more specifically the Lightning Network.
Eclair Node
Eclair is a Scala implementation of the Lightning Network. It is one of the oldest and most connected nodes in the network. There are also other implementations of Lightning Network including Lightning in C and Lng in Go.
Eclair Mobile
Eclair Mobile is a second generation bitcoin wallet, capable of using the Lightning Network. It can be used as a regular bitcoin wallet, but can also connect to the Lightning Network, allowing for instant payments with low fees.
This application is based on the open source software Eclair, and respects the specifications of the Lightning Network. It also embeds a Lightning node (90% of Eclair’s code).
The application is available on Android in testnet or mainnet mode.
Strike
They have created Strike, an API that allows merchants to integrate payments via Lightning Network. It works by regularly transferring micropayments made on the Bitcoin blockchain.
It is possible to set the maximum amount on the Lightning Network before transferring it automatically to a Bitcoin address.
The fee for this service is 1% of the transaction fee. Combined with BTCPayServer, it is an interesting alternative to Opennode and Bitpay.
A virtual online store called Starblocks is available to demonstrate the user experience with Lightning Network.
Explorer
The explorer displays all known Lightning Network nodes and channels. Nodes that share their IP are geo-located on a world map. It is possible to scan the QR code of a node with a Lightning Network enabled wallet to open a channel with that node.
Conclusion
To date, the Lightning Network is deployed on nearly 10,000 nodes worldwide. North American companies Blockstream and Lightning Labs are also contributing to the deployment of the Lightning Network.
While the Lightning network is not ready for prime time, it is certain that the adoption of Bitcoin will require stable, high-performance products. ACINQ has a card to play in attracting as many users as possible to its innovative products for profitable monetization of its services in the years to come.
We invite you to follow their progress on the products presented above on Twitter and Medium. Feel free to share in comments your opinion on Lightning Network, do you think this project can succeed?
