IOV Labs Takes on Lightning Network With New Light Client

iov-labs
13 May 2020

IOV Labs, which builds platforms secured by bitcoin’s hashrate, launched Wednesday a light client for the Lumino Payments Network, its smart contract-compatible rival to the Lightning network 

Lumino Light Client will run on mobile devices via integrated wallet apps, according to the Gibraltar-based firm. 

Light Client comes nearly a year after the firm formerly known as RIF Labs unveiled Lumino. Based on IOV Labs subsidiary RSK’s Rootstock sidechain, Lumino secures smart contracts and ERC-20 compliant tokens via the Bitcoin network in what IOV Labs called a “layer three solution.”

Before Lumino, Gabriel Kurman, an RIF strategist, said 10 full nodes and three “hubs” – nodes that communicate with light clients but do not manage any private keys – comprised the Lumino Network for a processing power of about 100 transactions per second (tps). That’s faster than the bitcoin mainchain (about 3.6 tps by the seven-day average) slower than Visa (65,000 tps capacity) and well below what IOV Labs claims Lumino can scale to: 20,000 tps. 

See also: Bitcoin Wallets Are Adopting This Tech to Simplify Lightning Payments

“All the focus now is in bootstrapping the network, and the more nodes, channels and hubs we have the more transactions can be processed in the network as a whole,” Kurman said.

For now, IOV is assuming Light Client will be Lumino’s most critical user gateway, “as we expect 99% of the users access it via a mobile Light Client,” Kurman said.

IOV is also attuned to crypto users’ increasing appetite for stablecoins. 

“Given the growing ecosystem of decentralized stablecoins being launched on RSK & Lumino, such as DollarOnChain (Bitcoin-backed collateralized Dollar), RIFDollar (RDOC), there is a great opportunity for wallets to enable off-chain nanopayments,” Kurman said.