Kevin Hurley

A lot of us actually came from Facebook, where we were building Diem. Coming from there, we realized that you really need something truly neutral and decentralized as a settlement network for payments globally.

We took that mission that we had at Diem of trying to build this global, interoperable, open protocol for money and bring it to something that we think can actually really take off and truly revolutionize how money works. That's why we ended up on Bitcoin and Lightning. Initially, our plan was to try to make Lightning very simple.

We took that mission that we had at Diem of trying to build this global, interoperable, open protocol for money and bring it to something that we think can actually really take off and truly revolutionize how money works. That's why we ended up on Bitcoin and Lightning. Initially, our plan was to try to make Lightning very simple.

We took that mission that we had at Diem of trying to build this global, interoperable, open protocol for money and bring it to something that we think can actually really take off and truly revolutionize how money works. That's why we ended up on Bitcoin and Lightning. Initially, our plan was to try to make Lightning very simple.

Take all the complexity of Lightning, abstract that away, and make it so that customers can onboard to Lightning really easily. And then we start to add new use cases to make it into something that is really valuable for our users and is something that they can actually use for real-world use cases.

Take all the complexity of Lightning, abstract that away, and make it so that customers can onboard to Lightning really easily. And then we start to add new use cases to make it into something that is really valuable for our users and is something that they can actually use for real-world use cases.

Take all the complexity of Lightning, abstract that away, and make it so that customers can onboard to Lightning really easily. And then we start to add new use cases to make it into something that is really valuable for our users and is something that they can actually use for real-world use cases.

Yeah, it took about a year. So we started in April is when we first started LightSpark. And I think it was probably around April of the next year that we actually put out our first product.

Yeah, it took about a year. So we started in April is when we first started LightSpark. And I think it was probably around April of the next year that we actually put out our first product.

Yeah, it took about a year. So we started in April is when we first started LightSpark. And I think it was probably around April of the next year that we actually put out our first product.

The initial plan was we were going to take L&D, which is a Lightning implementation, run that on AWS, and provide a really simple interface to run those nodes, to provide inbound liquidity dynamically, provide some machine learning for determining good routes, and make it really easy to integrate SDKs. What we found was that even trying to simplify it, it was still too complex.

The initial plan was we were going to take L&D, which is a Lightning implementation, run that on AWS, and provide a really simple interface to run those nodes, to provide inbound liquidity dynamically, provide some machine learning for determining good routes, and make it really easy to integrate SDKs. What we found was that even trying to simplify it, it was still too complex.

The initial plan was we were going to take L&D, which is a Lightning implementation, run that on AWS, and provide a really simple interface to run those nodes, to provide inbound liquidity dynamically, provide some machine learning for determining good routes, and make it really easy to integrate SDKs. What we found was that even trying to simplify it, it was still too complex.

We took that to customers and even those that had been in the Bitcoin space or the crypto space for a long time had a hard time understanding some of the core concepts of Lightning. Because in lightning, you have things like channels, whether pairwise channels.

We took that to customers and even those that had been in the Bitcoin space or the crypto space for a long time had a hard time understanding some of the core concepts of Lightning. Because in lightning, you have things like channels, whether pairwise channels.

We took that to customers and even those that had been in the Bitcoin space or the crypto space for a long time had a hard time understanding some of the core concepts of Lightning. Because in lightning, you have things like channels, whether pairwise channels.

The way I think about it is beads on an abacus, or if you ever went to the dentist in the US, they always had those toys where you had those beads that you pushed along a wire. That's what channels are, where sats are the beads on the wire, and it goes between point to point. And that concept is vastly different than what exists in really any other L2 or L1.

The way I think about it is beads on an abacus, or if you ever went to the dentist in the US, they always had those toys where you had those beads that you pushed along a wire. That's what channels are, where sats are the beads on the wire, and it goes between point to point. And that concept is vastly different than what exists in really any other L2 or L1.

The way I think about it is beads on an abacus, or if you ever went to the dentist in the US, they always had those toys where you had those beads that you pushed along a wire. That's what channels are, where sats are the beads on the wire, and it goes between point to point. And that concept is vastly different than what exists in really any other L2 or L1.

So it was really hard for customers to understand who do we open channels to? What are channels even mean? How do you get inbound liquidity? How do you make this work well? So we found that the first version was still too complex.