Elizabeth Stark is the founder of Lightning Labs and has a prominent place among blockchain entrepreneurs. She is a member of the leading digital currency policy body, Coin Center, and a consultant to numerous cryptocurrency companies and startups.
Elizabeth Stark Life
Elizabeth Stark is a legal scholar, computer scientist and blockchain entrepreneur. She has taught peer-to-peer technology, privacy, and related topics at Stanford and Yale, where she focuses on the intersection of politics and technology.
In 2016, Stark founded Lightning Labs, the developer of the Lightning Network. The network is a Layer-2 scaling solution that aims to allow up to 1 million Bitcoin transactions per second. Stark continues to serve as the company’s CEO. He is also a fellow at Coin Center, a nonprofit that advocates for pro-crypto public policy.
In 2022, Stark saw the Lightning Network reach new heights. It became available as a deposit and withdrawal method for Cash App and Kraken apps. Shortly after, Lightning Labs raised over $70 million from investors to develop the Taro protocol, a software that allows stablecoins to be sent over the network. An alpha version of Taro was released in September.
Another milestone for Lightning was reached when the number of BTC locked in the network’s payment channels (often referred to as “capacity”) exceeded 4,000 in June 2022. In October, the 5,000 BTC limit was reached. Payments provider Strike also made Lightning transactions available in some Shopify stores in 2022. In December, Strike launched Bitnob, a Kenya-based Bitcoin savings platform and remittance service that uses the Lightning Network for cross-border transfers.
Throughout the year, Stark has also tried to herald the adoption of crypto. He attended the Bitcoin 2022 conference where he hosted a discussion called “Youngest Bitcoin Coders”, which included young Bitcoin coders Ishaana Misra and Autumn Domingo. At MIT Bitcoin Expo 2022, he participated in a “fireside chat” where he explained how the Lightning Network works and allows Bitcoin to scale. At the African Bitcoin Conference, YouTuber Sama Time interviewed Stark, discussing Bitcoin’s wider role in the world.
Stark’s Lightning Labs is likely to continue making progress in 2023. Business intelligence company MicroStrategy has already announced that it will offer software-as-a-service products on the network in 2023. The network received its first Bitcoin ATM integration in January. Via a location in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.
Official data for transaction numbers on the network is hard to come by, but its proponents seem to agree that Lightning is still in an experimental stage.
