Bitcoin Lightning Network Opens Thunderbolt Station for $1 Billion Reservations

The Bitcoin Lightning Network has officially opened its Thunderbolt Station for reservations, marking a significant milestone in the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Led by early Bitcoin Core developers and the Nubit team, the Thunderbolt Station allows institutions and eligible users to reserve network construction capacity and participate in mainnet rewards distribution through the newly launched tsUSD token.

The reservation process is divided into three phases. Currently, users can lock in future construction capacity using the tsUSD token, which supports various payment methods including BTC, USD1, and BRC-20, Runes, and other Taproot script assets. This is the first instance where Bitcoin native assets are being utilized in a mainnet infrastructure participation scenario, highlighting the innovative approach of the Thunderbolt Network.

Several institutions, family offices, and investment firms have already confirmed their participation in the first round, with total interest expected to exceed $1 billion. The developer community is actively exploring new directions around the Thunderbolt Station, including composite asset design, on-chain liquidity pools, and Bitcoin-native structured products. This mechanism is seen as a pivotal event in the transition of the Bitcoin Lightning Network ecosystem to an open infrastructure collaboration stage.

The Thunderbolt Network, which supports native acceleration and stablecoin settlement, has processed over 4 million on-chain transactions in its first two months of operation, with a user base exceeding 267,000. The network has also integrated the Trump family's crypto project WLFI, with its stablecoin USD1 becoming one of the first native settlement assets on the Thunderbolt Network.

In April, HSBC Bank revealed that the Thunderbolt 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 Bitcoin Alpha task system has received project applications from over 50 teams in the first phase, leveraging the Lightning Network to provide faster payments and programmability, ushering in the largest period of prosperity in the Bitcoin ecosystem in 12 years.