“By lifting things off the Bitcoin chain, we get this freedom to experiment and explore different tradeoffs,” said Christian Decker, Lightning protocol engineer at Blockstream.

In addition to Decker, the roundtable conversation also included Olaoluwa Osuntokun, CTO of Lightning Labs and Matt Corallo, Lightning developer at Spiral.

The fact that there exists different Lightning implementations means that there are different offerings available to users, and they can pick which node to run based on their specific needs. However, that can be intimidating and confusing for users as they tip-toe into Bitcoin’s second layer. Among the many different options, prominent Lightning node offerings include Lightning Labs’ LND, Blockstream’s Core Lightning, ACINQ’s Eclair and Spiral’s LDK.

LND also boasts arguably the largest full-time development team. As a result, the team has managed to build a plethora of value-added services around LND, such as Aperture and the liquidity services Lightning Loop and Pool.

Osuntokun said that despite being a new technology, Lightning is being recognized more broadly and plenty of research papers have been published recently.

“Core Lightning has always been the ‘lego block’ kind of node where you can swap parts. We’ve gotten feedback from researches [saying] they could just get a plugin and add it to their nodes to test things quicker,”

Instead of providing a fully-fledged node, LDK seeks to bring a tool kit to help people building on Lightning.

By abstracting the networking and database interfaces, for instance, LDK allows developers to run LDK inside a browser that requires WebSockets and to enjoy more flexibility when it comes to storing and managing Lightning state data.