Founder: Graham Krizek
Date Based: October 2020
Location of Headquarters: Wichita, Kansas
Variety of Staff: 17
Web site:
Public or Non-public? Non-public
In 2012, quickly after Graham Krizek found Bitcoin and subsequently started contributing to Bitcoin Core and constructing his personal functions on Bitcoin, he seen a problem that was hindering Bitcoin builders.
“The problem that I saw was that everyone was building everything from scratch — over and over and over again,” Krizek advised Bitcoin Journal. “There was no cloud environment where you could just spin up Bitcoin infrastructure and be able to start developing against it.”
On the time, Krizek didn’t really feel compelled to behave on this concern, although. He was nonetheless primarily centered on his profession as a software program engineer outdoors of the Bitcoin area, working for numerous startups in addition to corporations as giant as Salesforce, whereas contributing to Bitcoin in his free time.
However one thing shifted inside him when he realized in regards to the Lightning Network.
He noticed its potential and knew that it must be made simpler to make use of if it had been to be extensively adopted.
“When I found Lightning, I said to myself ‘Okay, this is the next phase of Bitcoin adoption, the thing that’s going to really drive it to the next level,” mentioned Krizek.
“Then, I saw the same pattern happening as I did with Bitcoin. Everyone kept starting from scratch while building, but the problems were more intense because Lightning is that much more complicated,” he added.
“I was like ‘We need a cloud provider where you can just click a button and have a Lightning node running and maintained for you.’ It can just be there so we can develop applications and build the projects we want to build much easier, much faster.”
And so Krizek started working in creating such a product.
He shared the preliminary iteration of it with pals and acquaintances, a lot of whom started utilizing it a lot that the challenge demanded extra of his consideration.
“The usage grew to a point where I was like, ‘Man, I either need to shut this down because I can’t maintain it anymore or I need to turn this into a business and do it for real,’” mentioned Krizek.
He selected the latter, and by late 2020, he’d based Voltage.
How Voltage Works
Voltage abstracts away the complexities of utilizing Lightning by permitting customers to deploy a Lightning node and spin up a channel in just some clicks.
Whereas Voltage hosts your node in its cloud, its public key, friends, channels, stability and transactions all stay personal, as the entire visitors routed by the node is transferred by way of Tor.
Whereas your node is working within the Voltage cloud, which is supported by the Google Cloud and a number of other different cloud service suppliers, Voltage additionally helps customers handle liquidity and gives different types of buyer assist.
Primarily, Voltage abstracts away the difficulties of partaking with Lightning, whereas supporting its customers within the course of. And it does this in efforts to assist establishments extra readily undertake Lightning. Krizek additionally talked about they’ve new merchandise and capabilities to assist even conventional finance corporations with the combination.
“The mission of Voltage is to make Bitcoin and the Lightning Network accessible to every business on the planet,” mentioned Krizek.
“Lightning is fantastic. It’s got a lot of really amazing capabilities, but it can be really hard to wrap your head around it and especially to incorporate it for business operations — especially for businesses that maybe aren’t in the Bitcoin or crypto space,” he added.
“We make it easy to use and plug in.”
What Varieties Of Firms Are Utilizing Lightning?
In the previous 12 months, notable corporations corresponding to main crypto alternate Coinbase and Latin America’s largest fintech financial institution Nubank have included Lightning into their operations.
Krizek sees this development of crypto exchanges, neobanks and different monetary service platforms onboarding to Lightning persevering with within the 12 months forward.
“Finance companies are definitely going to be the biggest movers because if you can take the value of sub-second settlement with zero fees and apply that to a big payment processor that does global payments, it’s an incredible value add for their business,” mentioned Krizek.
What’s extra, Krizek sees corporations outdoors of the Bitcoin, crypto and finance area additionally starting to make the most of Lightning in 2025, partially, as a result of corporations like Voltage are making it simpler to take action.
“2025 will be a big year for starting to branch out of our niche market,” mentioned Krizek.
“The technology has still been a little rough around the edges for a big company like Walmart to be like, ‘Hey, we’re going to plug this in now.’ Even with Voltage, we haven’t been perfect the entire time with making Lightning super easy to use,” he added.
“I think we’ve made huge strides in the last like year, though, and we have a lot more coming out.”
One other main hurdle for corporations seeking to undertake Lightning is the chance that comes with managing bitcoin’s volatility.
However that danger doesn’t exist if corporations ship Tether (USDT) over Lightning as an alternative of bitcoin, which they are going to be capable to do quickly.
Tether (USDT) On Lightning
Krizek is optimistic about USDT coming to Lightning, as he believes it is going to spur progress on the community.
“I think that we’re going to have a lot of products and solutions around it,” mentioned Krizek.
“It’s not even just me being personally excited about it. A lot of our customer base is very excited about it. They’re asking for it directly from us because stablecoins are pretty much the biggest use case in crypto today,” he added.
“When you couple stablecoins with sub-second settlement fees and very low fees, that’s a huge unlock. With fees on Tron getting more expensive. People are looking for an alternative.”
(Tron has been the main blockchain for stablecoin transactions due to how low charges on the community have been traditionally.)
So far as USDT working over Lightning probably presenting a safety danger to Bitcoin (as I believe it does), Krizek doesn’t appear involved.
“It doesn’t worry me at all,” mentioned Krizek.
“I think that we’ve advanced since the Blocksize War in terms of takeovers, as I don’t think it’s as easy for a large institution to coerce the Bitcoin ecosystem like some did during the Blocksize Wars,” he added, referring to Tether probably gaining outsized affect over Bitcoin.
“And it’s even better to integrate something like Tether (USDT) on Lightning because it’s a peer-to-peer network — it’s not public consensus. So, you have much more ability to say ‘Hey, if you don’t want to participate in the USDT transfers, just don’t do it.’”
Transferring Ahead In A Professional-Bitcoin Regulatory Surroundings
U.S. Crypto Czar David Sacks is an investor in Voltage (by way of his enterprise capital agency, Craft Ventures). This may point out that he has some understanding of the Lightning Network and the function of bitcoin as a medium of alternate.
So, does this imply that the U.S. is on the verge of embracing bitcoin as such?
Based on Krizek, not precisely.
“Everyone is screaming at the government right now for a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, which treats bitcoin as a store of value,” defined Krizek.
“Over time, we will definitely hear more and more about bitcoin as a means of payment. We just need to get through this Strategic Reserve conversation first and then say, ‘Okay, what else can we do with this?’” he added.
The proven fact that the federal government is portray Bitcoin in any kind of constructive mild in any respect, although, is thrilling to Krizek. Since 2012, when he first entered the Bitcoin area, the federal government has both dismissed Bitcoin or been antagonistic in direction of it.
“When I started in Bitcoin, it was completely ignored, and the last four years were very bad for companies like us,” mentioned Krizek.
“With this new administration, we’ve definitely seen the tone shift. We’re still working through certain things, but we’re definitely turning a corner and heading in the right direction,” he added.
“I’m really excited to see where that can go over the coming year. I think it will be a positive one.”
