Bitcoin Lightning Payments Pass ‘Milestone’ With Blockstream Test

Progress on the bitcoin lightning network continues to advance.
Following a promising trial of its routing network last week by French startup Acinq, Montreal-based Blockstream has announced that it has sent the first end-to-end transaction over the Lightning Network, a highly-anticipated top layer for the bitcoin network designed to boost transaction capacity.
What the team called “Lightning’s first strike” saw its developers send a transaction across a test version of the network successfully to another party, a process that included invoicing that party for bitcoin and routing the payment through multiple nodes.
Sent over the bitcoin testnet, the transaction of 0.01 test BTC was used to “sell” a picture of two cats sitting in front of a sunset composed of ASCII characters.
While this may seem trivial, the announcement can be seen as a sign that Lightning is progressing from the concept stage toward implementation. To date, most of the implementations have focused on high-level items like routing and privacy, rather than offering an example of how Lightning might enhance bitcoin at scale.
Blockstream core tech engineer Rusty Russell told CoinDesk:

This post was published at Coin Desk on October 5, 2016.