I could see a P2P trading platform making use of this.

HodlHodl had supported Lightning network as the base currency (where seller's BTC is escrowed), then pulled it as they wanted to remain 100% non-custodial throughout.

Then Paxful added LN but only as a funding (and withdrawal) method for a BTC account balance.

So to-date, there is not a single P2P platform where someone can buy or sell bitcoin, using LN, without the BTC funds being held by the platform's custodial wall.et 

P2P_bitcoin

The original version of the backend protocol is free and open source: http://github.com/supertestnet/hodlcontracts

I am currently revising the protocol and will release a new free and open source version when it is ready.

> this eventually needs to be decentralized, right?

I don't think decentralized escrow is possible. The best I could probably do in the future is a federated oracle, where a group of people (e.g. 11 of 15) have to agree that some real world event happened in order to release the funds. But federations also have their downsides compared to just picking one person to trust.

Instead of making a decentralized escrow, what I hope happens is that lots and lots of people run an escrow service so that bitcoiners can choose from among them. Imagine if Marty Bent, Matt Odell, Stephan Livera, and many others all ran an escrow service and you could create an escrow contract using any of their nodes as the trusted party. (All non-custodial of course.) A bunch of independent centralized escrows could perhaps be just as good as one decentralized one.

Will you ever open source the tech? I think this eventually needs to be decentralized, right? There should be multiple escrows that compete on reputation.

thrown

We are developing an API so people can do whatever they want with it: if eBay and the like were to integrate this to their marketplace that would be great. 

Tristan

bitcoin

LightningEscrow - Bitcoin escrow using the lightning network

Interesting. Would be nice if this could be integrated into a peer-to-peer marketplace (e.g. a Bitcoin Lightning clone of Ebay).