Welcome to the sixth issue of this newsletter which covers market trends, Lightning Network developments and updates about LN Markets.
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⚒️ Building
We released a new LN Markets’s upgrade with a much requested feature: a trading account. This individual trading account enables an effortless and more intuitive global position management. It also includes a revamping of the risk management blotter.
You can keep using LN Markets as before, and you now also have the possibility to:
Keep a global balance of all your positions on the platform. This balance is equal to the sum of all your closed P&L, Margin Available (to enter future positions) and Margin Used (in running positions).
Deposit satoshis to your trading account before entering a position: click on Deposit and select a pre-set amount (250k sats, 500k sats, 750k sats, Max Amount) or enter it manually. This deposit will be added to the Margin Available for entering positions in the future. Max Amount is automatically computed to respect your trading limits (1 million sats - Margin Available - Margin Used).
Enter a position without having to pay an invoice for the margin, using your Margin Available instead.
Re-use directly your P&L from closed positions as margin for futures operations, without having to get the funds back to your wallet.
Withdraw part or your whole balance with just one global invoice, instead of one invoice per position as before: just click on withdraw and select a pre-set amount (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%) or enter it manually.
Here it how your new trading account works:
Our goal since we started developing LN Markets has always been to provide you with the fastest and most simple trading experience. And we believe the addition of this trading account follows the same ethos.
We now focus on adding a new product to our platform in addition to our CFD tracking the BTC-USD price!
On a different topic, the next release of Phoenix wallet will implement lnurl-auth, thus enabling seamless decentralized authentication to LN Markets (as shown in this video) directly from one of the most popular Lightning wallets.
As a recap, here is a table of wallets that support lnurl (LN Markets has implemented both lnurl-auth and lnurl-withdraw):
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Metrics
A few statistics on LN Markets activity after 100 trading days (with max margin amounts are still limited to 0.01 BTC per wallet):
16,000 trades
$6 million aggregate volume
69% long orders / 31% short orders
Average leverage = 30
Max P&L per trade = 0.04 BTC
Our metrics keep growing, and it’s only the beginning!
🤓 Lightning integration in Electrum
A very positive development for the whole Lightning Network ecosystem: Electrum, one of the most popular open source software wallets, has just released its beta version 4.0 with experimental support of the Lightning Network!
The software is in beta: use at your own risk and do not put large amounts in lightning channels. Also, funds stored in lightning channels are not recoverable from your seed. You must back up your wallet file every time you create a new channel.
The main features of this new release are:
PSBT (Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions): an industry standard to make it easier for wallets to communicate with each other in the case of online/offline wallets, software/hardware wallets, multisig wallets, and multi-user transactions.
Lightning: the implementation relies on Electrum servers to query channel states. Since servers can lie about the state of a channel, users should either use a server that they trust, or setup a private watchtower.
Watchtowers: particularly relevant for lightning wallets that remain offline for extended periods of time, a watchtower is a service that relies on a third-party node to detect if a dishonest party attempts to steal fund, and send funds back to the honest party. Electrum can run a local watchtower or connect to a remote one.
Submarine swaps: a service for atomic swap of on-chain and lightning bitcoins against payment of a fee.
On our end, we could not wait to try it out 😬.
And this is how the Electrum trading experience looks like on LN Markets:
For more info on Lighting in Electrum, here are some great slides by Thomas Voegtlin, who once famously said:
🎧 Podcast
In case you missed it, here comes your best running podcast for the week-end!
Marty Bent and Alex Bosworth chat about Alex’s journey in the Bitcoin ecosystem and his current work at Lightning Labs, the state of the Lightning Network, why more exchanges should add support to Lightning and the new business opportunities it creates:
⚡ Bonus
Ryan Gentry has compiled on a Twitter thread a great list of Lightning Network applications in different verticals.
We leveraged our awesome consulting skills to produce this magnificent summary table:
And a special thanks to Zack Voell for the mention, nice feeling to onboard a hundred new users overnight 😀
Please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter and Telegram.
Thank you all for the support and let’s keep building a BILLION sats company together!