Stephan Livera and Desiree Dickerson opened and announced for the first-ever Lightning Conference that took place in Berlin over the weekend. The two-day event included two floors, two stages and was filled with over 500 lightning enthusiasts from all over the world. Automated beer machines, speakers and workshops, made the Lightning Conference the place to be for everything satoshi. If you were not lucky enough to make the trip over, fret not, we have created a list of our favorite speakers and workshops of the weekend!

Day 1 – Saturday, October 19th

  • Jameson Lopp, CTO of Casa Hodl and creator of Lightning.how kicked off the conference with his talk, ‘Enterprise Lightning FTW’ 
  • Conner Fromknecht, head of cryptographic engineering at Lightning Labs, had a talk to ‘pAMP it’, where he discussed the different ways of doing AMP in lightning.
  • Lisa Neigut has a twitch channel where you can follow her coding, in her talk called ‘Lightning x Liquidity or a Financier’s Guide to Staking Bitcoin’, she gives us a free merk on thinking about liquidity and how that intersects with the lightning network.  

The second stage sadly was not recorded but the highlights included: 

  • Chris Stewart, founder of Suredbits, with his talk on ‘Private Key Management for Exchanges with Lightning’
  • Konstantin Nick on ‘Approaching the Chicken and Egg Problem Using New Gameplay Mechanics’

On top of this, the event had workshops on going on at the same time. They were all approximately an hour long and focused on a bit of everything, and conversation on liquidity. Bryan Vu stood out with ‘A Discussion of Lightning Products and Routing.’ and Rui Gomes ‘Building Your First Lightning App Using OpenNode.’ 

Live Stream from day 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtU7ZlxvLL4&t=4570s

Day 2 – Sunday, October 20th 

  • Alex Bosworth, lightning infrastructure lead at lightning and CEO of Yalls.org, hosted the first talk of day two with the ‘Principles of Lightning Liquidity’, he wanted to address the misconception of sending cheap on the lightning network. 
  • Chris Dannen from Iterative Capital discussed ‘Solving Lightning Liquidity for Developers’, this was different from Alex who talked about liquidity within the market, Chris spoke about liquidity at the margins at the market. 
  • Giacomo Zucco and Maxim Orlovosky, shared the scene to have a not so-toxic talk about ‘Spectrum: Assets on Lightning Network’. 
  • Brandon Curtis, talking about ways to getting more users into the lightning network, with ‘Unpopular Paths to a Billion Lightning Users’
  • Eric Wall, for the Human Rights Foundation, talks about the ‘Threat Profile: Big Brother’. How the lightning network is being surveilled and how the network can be broken. 
  • Richard Myers, on how to ‘Incentivizing Mobile Mesh Networks with Lightning’. 
  • Randy Brito discusses how to ‘Chat and Send Bitcoin without Internet’.

Day two, stage two:

  • Vibhaalakshmi Sivaraman, chatted about Spider routing in ‘Current Approaches for Pathfinding of Payments on the Talk Lightning Network’. 
  • Rene Pickhardt held a talk about the ‘Current Approaches for Pathfinding of Payments on the Talk Lightning Network’
  • ‘The Impact of Schnorr, Taproot, and Tapscript on Lightning’ with Michael Folkson 
  • Nadav Kohen on ‘Replacing Payment Hashes with Payment Points’.
  • A very special treat was the appearance of ZmnSCPxj. Many know him from the first-ever Bitcoin mailing list. This weekend he made his first-ever appearance and talked about Scaling Up Pathfinding. 

Live Stream from day 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY-0dqlZsJ0&t=26742s

Announcements: 

Hosted by ACINQ that help develop Eclair and a contributor to the Lightning Network. They announced a day before the conference that they are introducing Phoenix, a 2nd generation Lightning Wallet. This was to demonstrate what they themselves think of the future of Bitcoin/Lightning UX should be.