Bitcoin [BTC] will be tested on Lightning Network before going on Liquid Network, says Allen Piscitello
Allen Piscitello, the Director of Product Management at Blockstream, spoke about the launch of Liquid Network during an interview with Crypto Insider and how it is similar to Lightning Network in some ways. According to him, Lightning Network may have scalability issues in the future as it is only involved with issued assets.
Sidechains, as an idea, have been floating around for quite a while now, with the basis to extend decentralization to other sectors and assets. Sidechain is a separate blockchain, but attached to a parent blockchain in a two-way peg which allows assets to be interchanged when moved across the chains with a fixed exchange range.
Sidechain didn’t face a lot of traction when the whitepaper was first published, according to Piscitello, but people did criticize it a lot when it was launched.
Allen goes on to point out the difference between Lightning and Liquid Network and agrees that they are similar to each other in some aspects and that both send payments faster by using payment channels.
Allen Piscitello added:
“With Lightning Network, you don’t even have to wait for two minutes and it is using a more reactive security model.” if someone tries to steal your funds you have time to reclaim all the funds in the channel, so that’s a different security model.”
He compared the nature of Lightning Network and said that it is geared towards “micropayments,” while Liquid Network focussed on a wide range of applications.
Allen Piscitello then explained a use-case scenario where a coffee transaction via the Lightning Network would happen without a glitch, but added that if a trader wanted to move 1,000 bitcoins from one exchange to another, it becomes a bit tough for the network to handle, as there needs to be enough capacity in all the different channels to move all those funds.
Therefore, according to Piscitello, the channel capacity and the routing issues in the Lightning Network become a bit more amplified in this use case and is not necessarily well-suited.
Liquid has the capacity to do what Lightning does not, said Piscitello, adding that the Lightning Network doesn’t support “non issued assets”.
The main difference between Lightning Network and Liquid Network is that Liquid has the ability to process arbitrary assets on their platform that can represent anything from fiat tokens to any other asset types. Piscitello confirmed that in the future if they wanted to scale, they wouldn’t have any problems, unlike Lightning Network. He added that they are looking to build Lightning Network on top of Liquid and that it will be an investment to Bitcoin and will be useful for the Liquid network.
Text copy from PIVOT