Bitcoin Lightning Network Launches Thunderbolt Station, Attracts $1 Billion Interest

Generated by AI AgentCoin World
Wednesday, Jul 2, 2025 8:07 am ET1min read

The

Bitcoin
Lightning Network has launched its Thunderbolt Station, marking a significant milestone in the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Led by early Bitcoin core developers and the Nubit team, the Thunderbolt Station is now open for reservations, allowing institutions and eligible users to secure their positions in the network's infrastructure and participate in revenue sharing.

The station's opening is divided into three phases. In the current phase, users can lock in future construction capacity using the newly launched $tsUSD token. This token supports a variety of payment methods, including BTC, USD1, and BRC-20, Runes, and other Taproot script assets. This initiative represents the first instance where native Bitcoin assets are utilized in a mainnet infrastructure participation scenario.

Multiple institutions, family offices, and investment firms have already confirmed their participation in the Thunderbolt Station. The cumulative interest for the first round is anticipated to surpass $1 billion. The developer community is actively exploring innovative directions, such as composite asset design, on-chain liquidity pools, and Bitcoin-native structured products. This mechanism is viewed as a pivotal event for the Bitcoin Lightning Network ecosystem, signaling its transition into an open infrastructure collaboration phase.

The Bitcoin Lightning Network, known for supporting native acceleration and stablecoin settlement, has processed over 4 million on-chain transactions within two months. The number of unique users has surpassed 267,000. Notably, the Trump family's crypto project WLFI integrated its stablecoin USD1 into the Thunderbolt Network, becoming one of the first native settlement assets.

In April, HSBC revealed that the Bitcoin Lightning Network introduced UTXO Bundling and OP_CAT instructions through a mainnet soft fork. These enhancements support native asset issuance and high-frequency transaction validation, improving on-chain processing efficiency by 1,000 to 2,000 times compared to the Bitcoin main chain. The Thunderbolt Network's mission system, Bitcoin Alpha, has received project applications from over 50 teams, leveraging the Lightning Network to provide faster payments and programmability. This development is seen as the largest boom in the Bitcoin ecosystem in 12 years.