Voltage wants to bring Bitcoin Lightning Network to every business in the world

Founder: Graham Krizek

Date of Founded October 2020

Headquarter Location: Wichita, Kansas

No. of employees 17

Website: https://www.voltage.cloud/

Is it Public or Private? You can also contact us by email.

Graham Krizek noticed a problem in 2012 after he discovered Bitcoin. He then began to contribute to Bitcoin Core, and built his own Bitcoin applications.

“The problem that I saw was that everyone was building everything from scratch — over and over and over again,” Krizek speaks to Bitcoin Magazine. “There was no cloud environment where you could just spin up Bitcoin infrastructure and be able to start developing against it.”

Krizek, at the time, did not consider himself obligated to do anything about this. In his professional life, Krizek was primarily a software engineering, and worked for startups, as well as larger companies like Salesforce. He contributed to Bitcoin when he had free time.

When he heard about Lightning Network, a change occurred in him.

It was a tool that had great potential, but it needed to be easier to use to make it more widely used.

“When I found Lightning, I said to myself ‘Okay, this is the next phase of Bitcoin adoption, the thing that’s going to really drive it to the next level,” said Krizek.

“Then, I saw the same pattern happening as I did with Bitcoin. Everyone kept starting from scratch while building, but the problems were more intense because Lightning is that much more complicated,” He also added.

“I was like ‘We need a cloud provider where you can just click a button and have a Lightning node running and maintained for you.’ It can just be there so we can develop applications and build the projects we want to build much easier, much faster.”

Krizek set to creating a new product.

The project grew as he shared it with his friends.

“The usage grew to a point where I was like, ‘Man, I either need to shut this down because I can’t maintain it anymore or I need to turn this into a business and do it for real,'” said Krizek.

In late 2020 he founded the second option. Voltage.

Voltage: How it Works

Voltage removes all the complexity of Lightning. Users can deploy Lightning nodes and create channels in just a couple clicks.

Voltage will host your node on its cloud. Your public key, peers and balances, along with all transactions are kept private.

Voltage offers a variety of support services to its users, including liquidity management and customer service. Voltage is also supported by Google Cloud as well as other cloud-based providers.

Voltage is a tool that abstracts the challenges of using Lightning while supporting the users. It does so in an effort to make Lightning more accessible for institutions. Krizek mentioned that they had new capabilities and products to aid traditional finance companies as well.

“The mission of Voltage is to make Bitcoin and the Lightning Network accessible to every business on the planet,” said Krizek.

“Lightning is fantastic. It’s got a lot of really amazing capabilities, but it can be really hard to wrap your head around it and especially to incorporate it for business operations — especially for businesses that maybe aren’t in the Bitcoin or crypto space,” He also added.

“We make it easy to use and plug in.”

What types of businesses use Lightning?

During the last year, major companies like crypto exchanges have been notable. Coinbase Latin America’s largest Fintech Bank Nubank Lightning is a powerful tool that many organizations have adopted.

Krizek expects that the trend of crypto-exchanges, neobanks, and other platforms providing financial services adopting Lightning will continue into 2019.

“Finance companies are definitely going to be the biggest movers because if you can take the value of sub-second settlement with zero fees and apply that to a big payment processor that does global payments, it’s an incredible value add for their business,” said Krizek.

Krizek also believes that companies from outside the Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and finance sectors will begin to use Lightning by 2025. This is partly because Voltage makes it easy to do.

“2025 will be a big year for starting to branch out of our niche market,” said Krizek.

“The technology has still been a little rough around the edges for a big company like Walmart to be like, ‘Hey, we’re going to plug this in now.’ Even with Voltage, we haven’t been perfect the entire time with making Lightning super easy to use,” He also added.

“I think we’ve made huge strides in the last like year, though, and we have a lot more coming out.”

Lightning’s risk of managing Bitcoin volatility is another obstacle that companies seeking to implement Lightning must overcome.

The risk of sending bitcoin is reduced if you send Tether USDT over Lightning. they will be able to do soon.

Lightning will use Tether USDT

Krizek believes that USDT will be a great addition to Lightning. He thinks it’ll spur the growth of the network.

“I think that we’re going to have a lot of products and solutions around it,” said Krizek.

“It’s not even just me being personally excited about it. A lot of our customer base is very excited about it. They’re asking for it directly from us because stablecoins are pretty much the biggest use case in crypto today,” he said.

“When you couple stablecoins with sub-second settlement fees and very low fees, that’s a huge unlock. With fees on Tron getting more expensive. People are looking for an alternative.”

Tron is the most popular movie of all time. leading blockchain for stablecoin transactions Because of the historically low network fees.

USDT over Lightning posing a potential security threat to Bitcoin is a concern. I think it doesKrizek does not seem to be concerned.

“It doesn’t worry me at all,” said Krizek.

“I think that we’ve advanced since the Blocksize War in terms of takeovers, as I don’t think it’s as easy for a large institution to coerce the Bitcoin ecosystem like some did during the Blocksize Wars,” He added that Tether could gain a significant influence on Bitcoin.

“And it’s even better to integrate something like Tether (USDT) on Lightning because it’s a peer-to-peer network — it’s not public consensus. So, you have much more ability to say ‘Hey, if you don’t want to participate in the USDT transfers, just don’t do it.'”

Advancement in a Bitcoin-friendly regulatory environment

Voltage is owned by U.S. Crypto Czar David Sacks (via his venture capital firm, Craft Ventures). It would seem that the person has some knowledge of Lightning Network, and how bitcoin functions as an exchange medium.

Do you think that this means the U.S. has a plan to embrace Bitcoin as it is?

Krizek says that it’s not quite right.

Everyone is screaming right now at the government for not delivering on its promises. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve“, which uses bitcoins as a form of store value”, explained Krizek.

“Over time, we will definitely hear more and more about bitcoin as a means of payment. We just need to get through this Strategic Reserve conversation first and then say, ‘Okay, what else can we do with this?'” He also added.

Krizek is excited that the government has even attempted to portray Bitcoin positively. The government’s attitude towards Bitcoin has changed since Krizek first started in the Bitcoin world back in 2012.

“When I started in Bitcoin, it was completely ignored, and the last four years were very bad for companies like us,” said Krizek.

“With this new administration, we’ve definitely seen the tone shift. We’re still working through certain things, but we’re definitely turning a corner and heading in the right direction,” He also added.

“I’m really excited to see where that can go over the coming year. I think it will be a positive one.”