Stellar (XLM) gets Starlight for Private, Instant, and Free Payments

The 6th largest cryptocurrency currently in the red has now gotten its own Lightning Network in the form of Starlight, a payments channels that allows private, free and instant payments.

Stellar Network gets its own Lightning Network in the form of Starlight

At the time of writing, Stellar has been trading at $0.2334 while being down by $0.26 percent. The sixth largest cryptocurrency has been managing the daily trading volume of $34.9 million. As shown in the chart below, Stellar has been on a downward momentum.

Though a bearish scenario seems to be in order, the price can surely bounce off of $0.20 if able to maintain stability above $0.23.

Meanwhile, Starlight, a payment channel implementation on Stellar has been released as the official announcement reads,

“Interstellar is pleased to announce a preview release of Starlight, an implementation of bidirectional payment channels on Stellar. Payment channels allow parties to transact privately, instantly, and securely while paying zero fees.”

By using the network to lock up some funds for channel’s participants use, the payments are made private, instant, and free when normally payment on the network would have involves small fee and waiting for confirmation.

The security is further ensured through special information in the form of signed Stellar transactions that ae not published to the network. When the channel closes, only the final settlement balances are revealed to the network while all other activity remains private and known to it participants only.

Currently, connected to the Stellar testnet, as pointed out in the announcement, Stellar now has its own Lightning Network,

“Starlight payment channels are analogous to the Bitcoin payment channels used in the Lightning Network. As we extend the Starlight project to support not only payment channels but also multi-hop payments across those channels, we plan to build in compatibility with other payment-channel networks, such as Lightning and Interledger.”

The preview supports bilateral channels including built-in wallet application and Starlight payment channel software. Though it allows transacting in XLM only for now, “Future versions will support any asset issued on the Stellar network.”