Couple of weeks ago, we have informed you straight from the Oslo Freedom Forum about the whole event. But during that time, we were also preparing an interview with Jeff Gallas from Fulmo, a company dedicated to research, development and consultancy for Bitcoin and Lightning Network.
We have talked to Jeff about the beginnings of Fulmo, potential of Lightning Network and the future of both. In the following paragraphs you will find his answers and opinions on very interesting topics connected to Bitcoin and Lighting Network, which you just cannot miss.
Marek: What were the beginnings of Fulmo?
Jeff: We kept an eye on Bitcoin, especially Lightning Network (LN) for a while. When the Lightning Network went into the mainnet in early 2018, we decided it would be good to start a company to explore it further and also learn a bit more about it since it was pretty unknown. Fulmo kind of happened from building community.
While Lightning Network was a bit older as a testnet, once it was revealed as a mainnet and was a bit more usable we started exploring it by having events such as Lightning Hackday, which are still ongoing, to get people together and see what you can do and help with the growth.
M: How much has the Lightning Network grown?
J: I think that especially last year we have seen a tremendous amount of growth. It feels like it came together pretty quickly and some problems are being solved pretty quickly as well. I think it grew in the past years a bit faster than anticipated.
M: In the next 3-4 years, what can happen with Lightning Network?
J: My hope is that we will not be talking about Lightning Network, but it will just be the sort of Bitcoin standard that most people transact on. My hope is that everywhere where we see Bitcoin, Lightning will be used in the background sort of as a scaling technology and we would not be in a space where we would specifically need to mention LN as you would not mention TCP/IP today, when somebody goes online. People are not interested in that they just go online and it works.
M: In all of this, where does Fulmo come in?
J: I think we are doing mostly education through events and bringing the community together and connecting with other people. We sell mostly educational products and projects like Bitcoin Lightning Full nodes, but also projects like Bitcoin Lightning ATM. These are not mass products, but can help early users understand it better. These can hopefully initiate the spark.
M: Any important upcoming events that you are excited about?
J: I guess we are back in full event mode after the pandemic. There is going to be a couple German speaking events that I am pretty excited about out of the Einundzwanzig (21) Community, namely the Bitcoin Citadel in Switzerland and BTC22 that will happen in Innsbruck, the biggest German speaking event so far. There is also Adopting Bitcoin event coming in November in El Salvador, which we already helped with last year and we are again helping a bit this year as well. There is also a conference in Ghana I believe in the beginning of December, which I believe should be the first Bitcoin only conference in Africa.
These are probably the more anticipated highlights of the year, but I think there is going to be a lot of smaller events. All of these events are happening in different parts of the world, which I believe is another trend. It seems like these events are becoming more local. Especially at the beginning, Lightning Network had more like a global community, but now more people seem to get interested, so the local communities are becoming much stronger, so there is more demand for local content, which is pretty cool to see, since you have a lot of smaller, hyperlocal things to be excited about.
On behalf of Investro, I would like to thank Jeff Gallas for his time and this interview, which was very insightful.
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