2018-03-15
Lightning reaches mainnet (Mar 2018)
The payments layer goes live: instant, near-free bitcoin transactions.
In March 2018 the first production Lightning implementations reached Bitcoin mainnet in beta, turning a 2015 whitepaper into a live payments network. Payments now moved instantly through pre-funded channels for fees of a few sats, settling to the chain only when channels open or close.
Lightning reframed the scaling debate SegWit had settled: the base chain as settlement, payments on the layer above. It is why streaming sats to a podcast or buying coffee with bitcoin stopped being a punchline.
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