"The Internet lacks a protocol for money" says Lightspark Co-founder" & CTO Kevin Hurley

“The best founders turn obstacles into opportunities and setbacks into setups for success.”

HackerNoon: What is your company in 2 - 5 words?

Kevin Hurley: Building innovative, scalable, decentralized payments

Why is now the time for your company to exist?

The Internet lacks a protocol for money. Lightspark is building the tools and services to make it happen. Using the Lightning Network, Lightspark builds enterprise-ready infrastructure for open payments on the internet at scale. An always-on, low-cost, universal payment network will completely transform how money is moved, enabling businesses and developers to transform existing solutions and build new financial systems, services, and processes accessible to everyone, transcending geographical restraints.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Every member of the Lightspark team is hardworking and extremely smart. They’re also tremendous team players, pitching in wherever their help is needed and going above and beyond in solving problems. We deeply believe in our mission of making money flow and unlocking global opportunity.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

The Lightspark team would say I would be likely reinventing a cake store - as I have a very sweet tooth. But more than likely I’d probably still be building, and traveling.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?

How well are our tools serving our customers, and are we innovating at the cutting edge.

In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

The Lightspark platform offers seamless integration with the traditional financial system, reducing the complexity of moving money on the Bitcoin blockchain - the most secure, battle-tested, decentralized blockchain. We have delivered exceptional scalability, performance, cost, and energy efficiency in making the Lightning Network go mainstream, which required a significant amount of work to reduce all the complexity. Lightspark simplified the initial setup and ongoing operational burden needed for access and enabled consumer-friendly experiences for our clients and partners.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Since launching about two years ago, we’ve introduced some exciting product offerings:

● Lightspark Connect: enterprise-grade access to the Lightning Network.

● Lightspark SDKs and APIs: the easiest ways businesses can integrate payments into their products and services.

● Universal Money Address (UMA): like an email address, but for money. UMA lets anyone send and receive money (fiat and crypto) 24/7 using their favorite UMA-enabled wallet, exchange, or bank. UMA is global and open source, built on top of LNURL and Lightning Addresses.

● UMA Auth: OAuth for money. For businesses, it’s an exciting new extension integrating payments directly into applications and services. It’s an open standard that enables UMA-enabled wallets to delegate the push and pull of money with limits set by the user.

● UMA Request: Built for UMA, this will allow any business or UMA-enabled wallet to request a payment from another wallet on the network. UMA invoices and payment requests will transform transactions for both businesses and individuals.

● Lightspark Extend: This is a significant step forward, enabling Lightning payouts to bank accounts over domestic payment rails. It reduces transaction times and costs and simplifies payments - globally connecting bank accounts.

● Spark: a solution for stablecoins and self-custody on Bitcoin. Spark is a new, payments-focused, high-performance, open-source, scalable Bitcoin Layer 2. It extends Bitcoin and Lightning and enables self-custodial wallets to send and receive real-time payments at virtually no cost. Spark also supports tokens such as stablecoins, making it the most comprehensive open payment network built on Bitcoin.

Where do you think your growth will be next year?

Our momentum is promising as we build the flywheel to unlock global money movement. We’re excited about UMA's network effects in particular. By the end of 2024, we estimate our partners will unlock UMA for nearly 300 million customers in 140 countries and 100 currencies.

Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.

We’ve partnered with major, important companies in our space, like Coinbase, Nubank, Xapo, Mercado Bitcoin, coins.ph, Bitnob, Bitso, Foxbit, BtcTurk and more. We don’t have any specifics to share just yet on revenue but we are operating soundly.

What’s your biggest threat?

I’ve always thought people underestimate squirrels. They look adorable, but they’re plotting something. At Lightspark though, it’s the constraints of time. There just isn’t enough time to do everything that I’d like for us to do.