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Lightning Labs has raised $10 million in Series A financing as it gears up to launch its first paid service for merchants looking to accept bitcoin payments.

Craft Ventures led the round, with Managing Director Brian Murray joining Lightning Labs board of directors. Other investors include Slow Ventures, former Goldman Sachs co-head of securities David Heller, Avichal Garg of Electric Capital and Ribbit Capital.

The funding round suggests some investors see the San Francisco-based startup as one of the few protocol-oriented firms with a prospective business model.

If bitcoin is going to reach its potential as a viable global currency, its going to need to scale beyond the base layer, Murray said. Similar to how Visa relieves banks from handling all fiat currency traffic, Lightning relieves the base bitcoin chain from handing all transactions, thus bring more speed and fee efficiency to the network.

Stepping back, Lightning Labs released a beta version of the scaling solution LND in 2018 and previously raised $2.5 million in a seed round from investors including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Square executive Jacqueline Reses, litecoin creator Charlie Lee and former PayPal COO David Sacks. Lightning Labs also launched a mobile wallet app in June 2019, and as of today the company is offering a paid service called Lightning Loop.

Loop aims to help merchants manage their payment channels more effectively. Lightning payment channels need to have bitcoin in them in order to stay open, which is a problem for those who actually use these channels without a perfectly balanced in-and-out flow.

Loop in helps people put funds into their existing channel kind of like a prepaid debit card for a lightning account, Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark said. Loop out is currently the most popular product because it allows people to continue receiving funds on lightning.

This service, which will charge a small percentage of each full loop, helps merchants and exchanges maintain liquidity in the channels.

With nearly a dozen lightning startups sprouting up over the past two years, Stark said her startup will distinguish itself by becoming an infrastructure provider to other startups.

The first Lightning Conference in Berlin attracted 500 participants in 2019, so there may initially be a small pool of developers and service providers willing to pay for back-end support. The way I see it, there will be an aggregate of financial services, of which Loop is one, and you can batch all of those, Stark said. The blockchain becomes an anchor layer for other Layer 2 services on lightning.

One example might include the shopping app Fold, which processed roughly 1,600 lightning payments during the 2019 holiday shopping season.

"Were growing fast and Lightning Labs loop service makes it simple to manage our lightning nodes liquidity, letting our team focus on building out great user experiences that bring lightning to the world," Fold's Will Reeves told CoinDesk.

Infrastructure spending

Beyond Loop, Stark said her startup will focus on options for larger payment channels in 2020, both opt-in channels that can individually hold more than $1,500 and Atomic Multi-Path Payments, which break payments into smaller parts and are able to return the whole amount if all the small parts dont promptly arrive at the same recipient.

River Financial CEO Alexander Leishman said his exchange startup, which uses LND to offer users lightning liquidity and trading functions, said Lightning Labs and ACINQ are the only two startups in the space focused on the nitty gritty of protocol development.

If it allows us to support larger amounts [of bitcoin] off-chain, it improves the experience for our users. Weve already had users that are frustrated with the [Lightning Networks] limits, Leishman said. Services that would make [lightning transactions] easy for us are definitely of interest.

Stark, who is an adviser to Leishmans exchange, said her goal for Lightning Labs is to enable automated services so the network will just work without clients needing to tamper with channel allocation and flows. The peer-to-peer messaging app Sphinx also uses LND, which Murray said is only possible because of what Lightning Labs is building.

Lightning Labs is building the channels for bitcoin to fulfill its promise as a medium of exchange, a means of micropayment, as remittance infrastructure, and much more," investor Jill Carlson of Slow Ventures said in a press release.

Murray agreed, adding he strongly believes the infrastructure behind popular mobile apps will take a different shape over the next decade because it will enable direct payments between peers instead of reliance on a third-party provider that monetizes user data.

In the meantime, Stark is optimistically curious about the ability to send small amounts of data and have payments attached to them.

Speaking more broadly of the batched services Lightning Labs will offer by this time in 2021, she concluded: These are lightning-native financial services that help improve the network.

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Lightning Labs Raises $10M Series A to Be the 'Visa' of Bitcoin - CoinDesk

During the overhyped meal with the Tron chief executive Justin Sun, which finally took place earlier this year, investment guru Warren Buffett did not say a singlebad word about Bitcoin to the Tron CEO and his guests: eToro CEO Charlie Leeand other top reps from the blockchain sphere.

While talking to Justin Sun and the other top reps of the blockchain and crypto industries, Warren Buffett spoke his mind on several major issues.

The old school investment guru said that Bitcoin still has a long ways to go to fulfillthe value of the blockchain. Therefore, he is certainthat his grandson will inherit his fortune not in Bitcoin but in good-old US dollars.

The DLT technology has great potential, reckons Buffett. A lot of the companies he has invested in, including JP Morgan, the banking giant, are studying blockchain and the opportunities it may offer. As per Justin Sun, the investment guru is curious to see how DLT will change the sphere of payments in the next decade.

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Being of a positive opinion of Elon Musk as an entrepreneur, Buffett thinks that Tesla shares are not the best asset to invest in at the moment Tesla has too many competitors in the market who havea lot of cash and who will not go away, the investor believes.

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Warren Buffett Changes His Take on Bitcoin (BTC) Is This Real? - U.Today

Bitcoin price remained well bid above $9,000 and rallied to a new 2020 high against the US Dollar. BTC is now trading nicely above $9,500 and signaling a strong increase to $10,000.

Recently, there was a downside correction in bitcoin from the $9,600 area against the US Dollar. BTC traded below the $9,400 and $9,300 levels, before the bulls took a stand above $9,000.

A swing low was formed near $9,079 and the price started a fresh increase above the $9,200 resistance area. The bulls gained pace and pushed the price above the 100 hourly simple moving average and the $9,500 resistance area.

Finally, there was a break above the $9,600 resistance area and the price traded to a new 2020 high at $9,764. Bitcoin is currently correcting lower below the $9,700 level.

It traded below the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the recent rally from the $9,076 low to $9,764 high. However, the previous resistance near the $9,500 and $9,520 levels is acting as a strong support area.

More importantly, there is a major bullish trend line forming with support near $9,460 on the hourly chart of the BTC/USD pair. On the upside, there are short term hurdles near the $9,700 and $9,750 levels.

Bitcoin Price

A successful break above the $9,750 level is likely to set the pace for a larger upward move. The main target could be $10,000, followed by $10,200.

On the downside, there are many key supports for bitcoin bulls near the $9,500 area. The next key support is seen near the $9,420 level. It coincides with the 50% Fib retracement level of the recent rally from the $9,076 low to $9,764 high.

Any further losses may perhaps lead the price towards the $9,340 level and the 100 hourly SMA, where the bulls are likely to take a stand.

Technical indicators:

Hourly MACD The MACD is about to move back into the bullish zone.

Hourly RSI (Relative Strength Index) The RSI for BTC/USD is currently rising and it is well above the 55 level.

Major Support Levels $9,500 followed by $9,420.

Major Resistance Levels $9,700, $9,750 and $10,000.

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Bitcoin Starts Convincing Rally To $10K After Short Term Correction: Here Are Key Hurdles - newsBTC