In a twitter thread on the Twitter Handle of ACINQ, the company announced the launch Phoenix, a second generation lightning wallet for faster payment.
The announcement reads:
“We’re very excited to introduce Phoenix, a 2nd generation Lightning Wallet. Phoenix demonstrates what we think is the future of Bitcoin/Lightning UX.”
According to ACINQ, the second generation lightning wallet allows making payments in less than three minutes.
The company said users can setup the wallet, send or receive money, make on chain and off chain payments, and do a full back-up restore, all in less than three minutes.
The Bitcoin technology company also said that Phoenix was launched with many new features to solve current user experience (UX) issues with present lightning network. These features include simple streamlined onboarding, no channel management, unified balance, transparent onchain/offchain payments, simple seed-based backup/restore.
Nuno Coelho, developer of another Bitcoin and Lightning wallet Bluewallet, said that this the biggest news since the main-net launch of Lightning. His tweet reads:
“This is important! A new leap forward on Bitcoin.
ACINQ just opened the pandora box to a wallet architecture that can be p2p with what seems to be ok trade-offs on UX and privacy.
Biggest news since lightning mainnet launch. Congrats ACINQ team!”
ACINQ, based in Paris, is one of the companies working on Bitcoin scalability. The company was founded in 2014 by Fabrice Drouin and, Pierre-Marie Padiou. This French start-up, in collaboration with other companies, builds an open standard for Lightning, a scalable instant payment network for the Bitcoin blockchain.
Éclair Mobile is another product pf the company which also is a next generation, Lightning-ready Bitcoin wallet. This wallet can be used as a regular Bitcoin wallet, and can also connect to the Lightning Network for cheap and instant payments.
In a press release on October 9, the company announced that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding round led by Idinvest Partners, with the participation of Serena and Bpifrance. This investment brings total funding to $9.7 million to date.
The Lighting protocol is there to solve Bitcoin scalability problem. It is a layer 2 payment protocol that operates on the top of Blockchain, mainly for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin scalability is regarded as number of transaction per second (tps), which, according to Lightning whitepaper, was less than 7 transactions per second at that time. This is not enough for Bitcoin network as it can collapse if Bitcoin is to replace all electronic payments in the future. Lightning network is one of the proposed and activated solutions to address this issue.
