A Bitcoin Lightning Web Standard, Inspired By Ethereum, Is Gaining Steam

Sending bitcoin lightning payments over the web might soon get easier.

That's because a new bitcoin standard for simplifying lightning payments, the open-source WebLN standard, is gaining traction, now being used by Lightning Joule and Bluewallet, two of the more popular lightning wallets, as well as apps like Lightning Spin, to slim down the number of steps a user needs to make a payment.

His work on ethereum's web standard, Web3, led him to what he calls an "a-ha moment," where he decided lightning opens up opportunities for a similar set of standards for bitcoin that could make interacting with payments on the Web much easier.

The ultimate goal, as he showed in his presentation of Chrome browser extension Lightning Joule last fall, is to embed payments into the web so that they're really easy to use.

That said, while WebLN is inspired by ethereum, O'Beirne says "WebLN is a lot more stripped down than Web3." After all, lightning is not a "Turing-complete system." Rather, since bitcoin's lightning is more focused on payments, that's where the focus of WebLN lies.

Bluewallet recently launched a marketplace within its mobile app that lists a bunch of different services which accept lightning transactions, including LN.pizza, Bitrefill, a startup that sells gift cards for bitcoin, and the like.

If a user were to go to, say, the LN pizza website on its own, they would have to grab the invoice by copying it, open their lightning wallet, then stick it in the wallet.

This little marketplace is like a window into how much easier the process could be for lightning micropayments across the World Wide Web, if such a standard gained enough traction and was used everywhere - perhaps the big dream goal - rather than just on a few random apps.

All that said there's also another standard lightning developers are eyeing right now that has to do with standardizing how lightning is used in the Web: W3C, which is the international organization drawing up rules for the Web for all browsers to follow.

Since some think developers should focus on that set of standards, O'Beirne goes as far as to call it a "Spec war." But so far, there don't seem to be any implementations of W3C that support lightning.