Zap - the Wallet for Bitcoin's Lightning Network Enters Testing

The lightning network is poised to change the way we think about Bitcoin payments in the future. The off-chain payment solution is already gaining ground in the community.

Of course, one cannot have mass adoption of it until there is the technology to facilitate such payments. This is where the Zap LN Bitcoin wallet will come in. Currently in the testing phase, many are excited to see how this could play a part in the scaling.

What is The Zap Wallet?

The Zap wallet is a Lightning Network UI wallet that is being developed in an open source fashion. This is great as it means that there are no businesses or outside influences impacting decision making.

Moreover, given that it is open source, it means that external developers can get actively involved and work on the code base that has been released. The developers want to give users the chance to partake in the roll out of the Lightning Network.

According to the creator of the Zap wallet, Jack Mallers, Zap has received a lot of interest from investors and business partners. However, he has declined these offers to build a better bitcoin experience. He claimed that Zap is

Dedicated to delivering beautiful interfaces along with a great experience as bitcoin enters a more consumer-facing era

The team announced the release of the Zap wallet last year in August in a blog post. They timed the release to coincide with the Segregated Witness fork last year. This is relevant because SegWit was a requirement for off chain payments on the lightning network to become a reality.

In another post in late January, Mallers mentioned the release of the Beta app on the test net. They have decided to use the test net in order to avoid a number of the problems that have cropped up with main net tests recently.

They did not want to release the Zap wallet on the main net until they were completely confident that the community was ready.

Impact on the Lightning Network

Although there has been a great deal of interest in the Lightning network and the way in which it can help Bitcoin scale, there have been one or two issues that have arise on main net transactions.

One the one end, you have users who are reporting that they have lost funds as well as payment channels that have not closed properly. This could probably be as a result of the lack of a user friendly interface.

This is why the Zap wallet should be of great interest to all those Lightning network proponents. It will allow newer users to send funds easily and effectively on the lightning network.

Hence, solutions such as the Zap wallet should be fully embraced and touted by the community. The hope is that there will be a number of other projects that try to achieve similar ends.

Those interested in following the latest updates to the Beta wallet can do so by following them on twitter. Developers could also pull the code and provide input to the project from the project's github.

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