Berlin’s Lightning Hackday Series Witnesses Huge Conglomerate of Hackers

German capital Berlin is not only the birthplace of Europe’s largest association of hackers, Chaos Computer Club (CCC) but also a safe haven for hackers and leading privacy activists. That’s what made Berlin a fertile ground for the on-going series of Lightning Hackdays. The series was introduced at the beginning of the year and continuously growing.

In April, first edition of the series attended by 70 participants. Shortly after the success of the first edition, in June second edition was hosted. On September 1st, third and most successful edition was hosted which was attended by over 160 participants. Third edition was accompanied by a hackathon. Lightning Hackdays series is all about meeting people with similar interest and exploring the technology with high level of discussion.

Lightning Hackdays’ third edition was organized at the second floor of the Ahoy coworking space on Saturday. The format of the event was different from other typical conferences. According to the event organizer Jeff Gallas there is hardly any business perspective of the event. The event was dedicated to the hackday. Hackathon was a day before the third edition. Hackathon was attended by at least a dozen coders. These coders have also attended the third edition and participated in the brainstorm and speaker sessions. Some of these coders are even coding up various applications for Lightning Network.

The event was organized by a Berlin-based Lightning research start-up Fulmo. Like the previous editions of the series which were attended by a Lightning Labs team, the third edition was also attended by Lightning pioneers such as Blockstrem and ACINQ. Lightning is in its early phase but it is a promising technology and could see a wave of adoption in near future. Some hardware wallet companies are also working on the implementation of the Lightning technology. Electrum could be the first bitcoin wallet to add Lightning as an additional option. Lead developer of Electrum, Thomas Voegtlin said that Electrum has already implemented Lightning but it is very basic. Before the launch, the company has to add some security features and then they have to forward lightning payments to others.