Lightning Labs Unveils Toolkit to Enable AI Transact in Bitcoin

The hype surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking multiple industries by storm, and the digital assets industry appears to be readily embracing the tech.

Lightning Labs has become the latest platform to tap the space. The team behind the Bitcoin Lightning Network announced the release of a new set of developer tools to enable the Lightning and AI developer communities to interact with Bitcoin seamlessly.

Lightning Labs Taps AI

According to the official blog post, the newly released toolkit assists AI applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT to interact with the Bitcoin network to send, receive, and hold the crypto-asset. Lightning Labs explained that the new tools are built on a Lightning native authentication mechanism – L402 protocol. It also uses a popular library called “Langchain.”

The firm also highlighted the problem of rising deployment costs that serves as a barrier due to the current billing paradigm, a crucial aspect that Lightning and the L402 protocol seek to address. As such, leveraging the L402 protocol, any entity with an internet-connected device will be able to receive or acquire Bitcoin instantly. Owing to the Lightning Network, high-volume payments can also be carried out while retaining privacy.

“We’re extremely excited about the new wave of innovation brought about with the latest wave of LLM models. With the L402 protocol and LangChainBitcoin, we’re able to ensure the open models can be accessed using an open payment system, connected to the world’s set of open APIs. In the end, open source will win, and we’re working to provide the tooling to enable greater accessibility to AI for humans and agents alike.”

LN Growth

Despite a slow start, Lightning Network has been increasingly embraced by crypto entities. The scaling solution witnessed tremendous growth as measured by the amount of BTC locked within it. The latest data shows that there are now more than 5.4k BTC on the Lightning Network.

Binance recently announced that it would start running multiple Lightning nodes to leverage the layer-2 scaling solution in a bid to enable cheaper BTC deposits and withdrawals on its platform.