Square launches Lightning Network Development Kit LDK! Let all developers easily build wallets

The global payment giant Square just stated on December 1 that it will change the company's name to Block, symbolizing its goal of continuing economic empowerment to the public through the blockchain. Today (7), Square's cryptocurrency department Spiral also released a short video to show the public the functions of a new tool: the Bitcoin Lightning Network Development Kit LIGHTNING DEV KIT (LDK).

Spiral project manager Conor Okus said in the video: The Lightning Network Development Kit can easily integrate real-time Bitcoin payments into any application.

Spiral said that in the past few years they interviewed dozens of wallet projects and developers and found that they encountered many problems when adding Lightning Network features. Therefore, LDK aims to remove the barriers to the realization of the Lightning Network, allowing developers to seamlessly plug their applications into mobile devices and point-of-sales.

LDK supports native APIs using Rust, C, Swift, Java and Kotlin coding languages, which allows developers to customize their wallet applications for their users in the language of their choice. In the film, a avatar Jack Dorsey (Jack Dorsey) shows how to use the Lightning Network (LN) to make payments, and describes LDK as: Allows any developer in the world to easily build a wallet application.

Lightning network nodes hit a record high

According to data from "BitcoinVisuals", the current lightning network nodes are at the highest level in history. In the past 3 months, the total number of nodes has increased by about 23% and 3,534 new nodes have been added; according to the data of the lightning network real-time analysis tool 1ML: Deadline Previously, the Lightning Network currently has 31,400 nodes, with a network capacity of approximately 3,285 BTC and a value of US$167 million.

With the release of LDK, the future development of Lightning Network will undoubtedly bring more development possibilities and ease of use!

Square12/10 officially changed its name to Block

According to previous reports from the currency circle, Square’s name change to Block will take effect from December 10. Jack Dorsey said: Block is a new name, but our original intention for economic empowerment remains the same. No matter how we grow or change, We will all continue to build tools to help increase our access to the economy.

Square was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey and became famous with the Cash App. By allowing micro-merchants to provide credit card services anytime and anywhere, providing services such as merchant management payment, financial processing, and website building, it quickly made a breakthrough in the payment market. The blood path has forced traditional payment giants such as Visa and Mastercard to follow up.

The number of users of Cash App is half of that of another payment giant, Venmo, but the revenue is twice that of Venmo. It is roughly estimated to be worth at least one billion U.S. dollars. Users can purchase bitcoins through Cash App since 2018. This figure is in Q1 this year. , Q2 came to 3.5 billion U.S. dollars and 2.72 billion U.S. dollars respectively. Although Q3 declined to 1.81 billion U.S. dollars, net profit was still as high as 42 million U.S. dollars.

Square also spent US$29 billion in the acquisition of Australian startup Afterpay in August this year with the intention of entering the buy-first-pay-later (BNPL) market. At that time, the case was hailed by Bloomberg as the highest acquisition amount of an Australian company in history (and also the largest in Square’s history). Acquisition).