Jack Dorsey: LDK to boost Bitcoin adoption

What is the best way to encourage Bitcoin adoption?

For Jack Dorsey the answer is: “Make it easy to use it as payment”, and he has already taken a number of steps in that direction.

His payment platform Square (recently renamed to Block) added Bitcoin trading to its Cash app back in 2018, and in the beginning of 2021 announced instant and free BTC transfers from one cashtag to another. This update, however, was somewhat artificial: Square acts in a way like a custodial exchange, and transferring BTC from one user to another does not imply any Bitcoin blockchain transaction.

A real non-custodial solution for cheap and fast Bitcoin transaction is Lightning network – a layer-2 scaling solution built on top of Bitcoin, but it often requires special IT development to implement it. However, this is going to become much easier now.

Yesterday the crypto arm of Block called Spiral presented Lightning Developer Kit (LDK) – a software library allowing developers to easily integrate instant Bitcoin payments into any application, which will allow any developer in the world to build a wallet without them having to think about all complexities.

Completely open-source, LDK can encourage more innovation all over the world, and ultimately – more people who can easily use Bitcoin as money.

Jack Dorsey is well-known not only for founding Twitter, but also for his crypto views: he has been advocating for Bitcoin and its open-source nature for a long time, also quietly stirring Twitter to crypto: Bitcoin (and Lightning Network in some countries) has been added to its Tip Jar feature, and the company hinted at a possible enabling of Ethereum-verified NFTs as profile pictures.

Now that Jack Dorsey has resigned from the position of Twitter’s CEO, it is quite probable he will concentrate on crypto projects. As he put it in the LDK announcement video: “Our goal is to make Bitcoin the native currency for the Internet. If we do that, we have a new global reserve currency, based on sound principles. Something that is deflationary, that is accessible to every single person on the planet that they can use to hold, to save, and also to transact with any Internet service you can imagine and all the ones we can’t imagine.”

We cannot but applaud ?