Company Name: Ln Bates
Founders: Ben Ark
Date of establishment: Project: 2019 | Company: 2022
Headquarter Location: Fully remote working (most developers are based in Europe)
Amount of Bitcoin in the vault: Not available
Number of employees: 6 (+ “dozens of other developers”)
Website: https://lnbits.com/
Public or private? private
Five years ago, Ben Ark had the first vision of Ln Bates — Free and open source software that works with any Lightning Network funding source and offers a range of Accessories For both personal and commercial use.
The vision for the project came to him in what he described as a flash of inspiration.
Christian Russo, Developer Raspy Blitz“He came to visit me and I remember sitting in the little laundry shed where he was staying, and I sat on the couch and I just kept saying, ‘LNbits, LNbits, LNbits,’” Ark told Bitcoin Magazine. “And then I said, ‘I think I’m going to do this project where you can put it on top of any funding source and you’ll have this shared API and then you’ll have some wallets and stuff.’”
Soon after, Ark, a Wales-based Bitcoin user, began working on the first LNbits project, a point-of-sale (PoS) extension of his friend Jörg Platzer, the now-defunct Berlin-based Bitcoin bar owner. Room 77.
“We were able to get the point of sale into the bar, and Jorg was amazed at how well it worked,” Ark recounted.
“What he really wanted was an accounting layer where you could export a CSV file and then import it into different wallets, so you could have different points of sale and each one had different wallets. None of that was possible in contract implementations at the time,” he added.
“So, we had to build that for George, and then I needed to build something so that I didn’t have to keep duplicating work when it came to creating different versions of projects.”
This thing was LNbits.
LNbits Developer Team Templates
In the years that followed, some of the brightest developers in the Bitcoin and Lightning space were drawn to LNbits, making contributions that would help put the project on the map.
Among these developers are Kali, the creator of CashU; LighterCreator our; Pavol Rusnakco-founder of Satoshi Labs And a host of other notable names and aliases including but not limited to: days, From the mines, Vlad Stan, com.supertestnet and Black coffee(Arc also noted that the initial design for Nostr “came partly from LNbits” and that Cashu “has been a LNbits project for a very long time.”)
This makes the LNbits developer team the Wu-Tang Clan of Bitcoin and Lightning developers – a super-talented group whose members do groundbreaking work together and individually.
If the LNbits development team is Wu-Tang, Arc is RZA, the group’s leader who organizes things and helps set up trade deals. However, the LNbits team came together not because of Arc’s master plan but because of practicality.
“LNbits came about out of necessity because a lot of us were duplicating work,” said Ark.
“A lot of us had to create all these different versions of our projects for all these different node implementations,” he added, noting that the primary motivation behind LNbits was to reduce redundancy.
The team really came together when Arc learned that major entities in the space were starting to use the software. At the Adopting Bitcoin conference in El Salvador, Arc met some of the team members from Ibexwho stated that they were using LNbits.
“They said, ‘We love LNbits. We use them for our products at our bank,’” Arch recalls.
“I said to myself, ‘Well, this was a buggy beta program. Please don’t use it in your bank,’” he added, laughing.
“At that point, everyone who was working on LNBits was saying, ‘Well, my God, there are people using this thing. I think we need to make a more stable version now that people can use and access, especially if they put it in their software stacks.’”
Prepared by LNbits
Ark’s interaction with the IBEX team led him to realize that it was time to turn LNbits into a real business.
“We had to create a company that could then pay developers to work on LNbits,” Ark said.
Ark compared the relationship between LNbits, the open source software, and LNbits, Inc., to WordPress.org and WordPress.com. WordPress.org is the company that runs and develops WordPress.com, which is open source software.
LNbits and WordPress are also similar in that anyone can develop plugins that give WordPress websites additional functionality just as anyone can develop plugins for LNbits.
While it is easy to incentivize development in the LNbits extension market by allowing developers to charge for the extension they create, convincing developers to work on the software itself is more difficult. Hence, Arc founded the company.
“By starting the company, we have some money to put into development, which is not very attractive, not very fun,” Ark said of the way LNbits approaches its software development.
“You’re unlikely to find people doing that in an open source, free project.”
LNbits Funding
Arc initially had some trepidation about telling the LNbits development team that he was starting the company, though he was pleasantly surprised by their reaction when he shared the news with them.
“I was very nervous with our open source community when I told them we were going to start a company to help fund development and so on,” Arch said. “But when we told them, they were all very excited about it.”
LNbits has since raised nearly $1 million in investment from venture capital firms, an amount and arrangement that Arc is comfortable with.
“I really like private capital when it’s tied to an open source, free project,” Ark said.
He then went on to describe how LNbits would have had to raise between $10 and $20 million if it had built LNbits as its own piece of software. Building it organically would have been much cheaper, and building it with the Bitcoin community in mind the entire time had its benefits as well.
“Having this piece of software and then having this community, which you kind of owe to, prevents you from making bad decisions,” Arch explained.
Exit the beta
Although LNbits has become widely used over the past five years, it has remained in beta throughout. Arc was in no rush to officially release a product that it did not feel was stable enough.
“In Bitcoin, there are a lot of projects that come out of beta very early,” Arch explained.
“It’s a sad and scary fact that they want people to trust the software they’ve developed, but we didn’t want to do that. We really wanted to be very conservative,” he added.
In preparation for the release of the first version, LNbits has integrated some financing and exchange services.
In the latest release, we added Phoenix D “As a source of funding for LNbits,” Arc began, describing the server equivalent of Phoenix Wallet For mobile.
“We have added” Breez Software Development KitWe use the Boltz swap service for trustless atomic swaps in and out. liquid“This means you can actually fund your LNbits using Liquid Wallet, which is absolutely amazing,” he added.
The Future of LNbits
Right now, Arc seems to be simply focused on getting the first release out and then continuing to fine-tune it so that people and businesses can rely on it professionally. Arc wants to make sure the team is focused so that it can “fix right away” if needed.
The Arc and LNbits team also want to create more educational content on showing people how to use LNbits as well as how to create their own LNbits extensions.
“It was a success for the project in the beginning,” Ark said. “We did a lot of educational content and everyone was like, ‘Well, cool, I can try and build something on this thing.’”
While Arc also seems excited about how LNbits could integrate more with Nostr (he’s been toying with the idea of running the Internet of Things (IoT) via Nostr), the most exciting part about LNbits’ future is that it has no limits.
In other words, in just five years, it has attracted great developers who have created the first versions of their revolutionary technologies (e.g., Cashu, Nostr) via LNbits, and that’s not to mention all the innovative LNbits extensions that developers have created.
The question now is who will develop over LNbits in the next five years and what will they create?
While Arc doesn’t claim to know, he’s certainly excited for what’s to come next, especially in the wake of the first issue’s release.
“Once we get to the first release, the real fun begins,” said Ark.
“We’re starting to see glimpses of it, because we can just build fun extensions to the functionality and build product services,” he added.
“And this is where the fun begins for the project.”