Voltage bills itself as “enterprise-grade infrastructure for the Lightning Network. Scalability should be as fast and as easy as Lightning itself.”
The company offers node hosting over clearnet to allow businesses to onboard to the Lightning Network, open payment channels and even run a point-of-sale interface with BTCPay Server.
This author has had the opportunity to set up a Voltage node and the entire process took all of five minutes; the onboarding was simple, the interface was smooth and the whole process was easy enough that my grandma could do it.
In addition to nodes, Voltage also has a liquidity service, Flow, which allows customers to purchase liquidity from other nodes on the network, creating the ability for clients to send and receive payments over the Lightning Network.
The CEO of Voltage, Graham Krizek, made an announcement at Bitcoin 2022, detailing two new products the company is releasing. Surge and its next-generation platform which comes with major improvements.
Surge allows users to monitor and observe their Lightning node. This product gives people who run nodes the ability to find problems, increase reliability and optimize the way their node operates. Surge gives Voltage customers brand new insights into their nodes. This includes keeping node operators up to date with history of peers’ online activity, whether or not payments are able to be routed through the node, the state of hash time-lock contracts (HTLCs) and more.
Surge will be available this summer.
The next part of the announcement included the next iteration of the Voltage platform. The goal of this new-and-improved interface is to make a more robust Lightning platform available. There will be major updates and improvements that give clients the capability to create one node or as many nodes as they wish. The company billed this as “next generation Lightning as a service.”
Voltage plans to make it possible for customers to pay only for what they use, while also giving complete control to the user. The Voltage platform allows a simplified, managed interface with robust APIs, advanced insights, node support and a lot more. The new platform also has a focus on developers with simple APIs, developer modules, logs and webhooks and load balances.
Krizek concluded, “This changes everything for the Lightning Network.”
Bitcoin 2022 is part of the Bitcoin Event Series hosted by BTC Inc, the parent company of Bitcoin Magazine.