Lightning Labs

Lightning Labs is a Bitcoin infrastructure company founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Francisco. It develops open-source software for the Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s layer-two payment protocol designed to enable fast, low-cost, and high-volume transactions. Co-founded by Elizabeth Stark and Olaoluwa Osuntokun, the company raised $82.5 million across funding rounds including a Series B.

Its core product is LND (Lightning Network Daemon), a full implementation of the Lightning Network protocol written in Go. Additional tools include Loop, a non-custodial submarine swap service for moving funds between on-chain Bitcoin and Lightning channels; Pool, a marketplace for buying and selling Lightning channel liquidity; and Lightning Terminal, a web-based dashboard for node operators to manage liquidity and monitor channels.

In 2023, Lightning Labs released the Taproot Assets protocol on mainnet, enabling developers to issue stablecoins and other digital assets on the Bitcoin blockchain that can be transferred over the Lightning Network. All core projects are released as open-source software under the MIT license and are available on GitHub.