
Upcoming talks at bitcoin++ Berlin 2025, lightning edition, Oct 2 - 4, 2025
This talk looks at how we’re moving from Lightning as a tool for developers to Lightning as a platform anyone can build on. I’ll share what it’s been like building Tando as a non-technical person and how we’ve used Lightning to create something real and usable for everyday people. The goal isn’t just innovation for its own sake. It’s about making Lightning simple enough so more people can build with it, especially where Bitcoin is actually needed.
Venue: Talks Stage
Tando
The gossip network that exists between lightning nodes is a fundamental component of the lightning payment channel network; without it, payers could not easily build routes and attempt to send payments. However, the health and performance of this network is not being actively monitored. Anecdotally, serious issues are discovered intermittently, and patched over with fixes. There are also observed issues with lost messages, or high bandwidth consumption, that are fundamentally at odds, given how gossip works today. With the gossip v2 proposal underway, this talk explores: - The performance of the existing mainnet gossip network, by presenting analysis of observed gossip traffic - Historical changes in implementation behavior, and how may that impacts gossip performance - Brief introduction to Minisketch and Erlay as an alternative to batched flooding; differences between Bitcoin L1 gossip, and Lightning gossip - Discussion on how the current gossip v2 proposal impacts usage of Minisketch / set reconciliation - Call to Action / Call for Feedback
Venue: Main Stage
Developers build the Lightning Network, but users like me live it [I work front-of-house at LN Markets, handling customers every day, and I’m not a dev.]. This talk brings a fresh perspective to the table, showing you how your work impacts real people. By sharing my experience, I’ll help you see where Lightning excels and where it needs refinement to onboard the next million users (hopefully). For a developer audience, this is a chance to align technical innovation with practical usability, straight from someone who’s been in the trenches.
Venue: Talks Stage
LN Markets
We'll describe how we secure one of the largest Lightning Nodes on the network, why usual go-to solutions don't work, and why it applies to most crypto-currency applications (layer 2, smart contracts, ..).
Venue: Main Stage
ACINQ
Lightning Network adoption faces critical challenges: unreliable offline receive capabilities, expensive node hosting, and loss of self-sovereignty from custodial wallets. Lexe’s radical next-generation architecture fixes these problems by leveraging Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to create secure, always-online Lightning nodes that don’t compromise on self-custody.
Venue: Main Stage
Lexe
What’s new in Lightning and how it’s currently splicing out.
Venue: Main Stage
core-lightning
Since 2018 I have been studying the Routing dynamics of the Lightning Network. My results have been influential to all major implementations. Yet many of my findings and knowledge is scattered over various research papers, git discussions and articles. Also I have obviously read quite a bit about the ideas of other researchers. I would like to use this opportunity to summarize everything that I have learnt over the years about the routing dynamics and liquidity management challenges on the network. Hopefully this will give you a solid basis of insights to improve your lightning network operations.
Venue: Main Stage
OpenSats
Discover how a simple elliptic curve trick enables more private and flexible Lightning payments. This talk breaks down the math behind PTLCs — including adaptor signatures, scalar tweaks, and how they improve on HTLCs
Venue: Talks Stage
ZBD
Graduated wallets allow users to onboard to a custodial system and experience the magic of making a Lighting payment, then upgrade when it's economically feasible to self-custody. Learn about how ZEUS is thinking about graduated wallet UX and our Cashu integration.
Venue: Main Stage
ZEUS
An in-depth analysis of the tradeoffs between new protocols like Spark, Spark vs Lightning, and Spark vs. LND
Venue: Main Stage
Spiral
Why bitcoin is the native currency for the internet and AI, how Nostr Wallet Connect enables seamless and controlled AI access to a bitcoin lightning wallet, and real world examples and tools that enable users to spend bitcoin using their AI agent and developers to charge bitcoin for AI access.
Venue: Main Stage
Alby
Lightning is becoming the de-factor interoperability layer for bitcoin payments. However, as an end-user you might not want to run a lightning node. In this talk I give a short intro to Ark and explain how it can make your lightning experience go better
Venue: Main Stage
Second
In this workshop, we’ll explore how the RGB protocol extends the Lightning Network with asset capabilities.We’ll start with a quick overview of how RGB works on LN. Next, we'll dive into a live demonstration of managing two RLN nodes: opening a channel, transferring RGB assets, and performing an asset swap. We’ll then take a peek at the code of RLN and its custom fork of rust-lightning, showing how straightforward it can be to adapt an existing Lightning node for RGB compatibility. An open discussion on future developments and potential applications will wrap up the workshop. Throughout the session, active participation will be encouraged.
Venue: Talks Stage
Bitfinex
Bitfinex
Description to come
Venue: Main Stage
Blockstream // Greenlight
This talk introduces fuzzing and differential fuzzing techniques. We'll explore how these testing methods can make the Lightning Network more secure and robust by uncovering inconsistent behavior between different Lightning implementations and their adherence to the BOLT specifications.
Venue: Main Stage
Vinteum
Stacker News moved to non-custodial on Jan 3, 2025. This talk will cover how we transitioned to it over the course of 2024, the challenges we had to overcome to deliver a good user experience, and how it’s going.
Venue: Talks Stage
Stacker News
SimLN is an open-source Rust tool for simulating Lightning Network payment activity across real or mocked topologies. Compatible with LND, CLN, Eclair, it enables developers, researchers, and signet operators to generate realistic traffic for load testing, protocol evaluation, or synthetic data generation. This session introduces SimLN’s capabilities, demonstrates how to configure and run simulations using a simple sim.json file, and explores its flexible modes—from fully randomized traffic to precisely scheduled payments. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how to integrate SimLN into their own environments to accelerate testing and experimentation on the Lightning Network.
Venue: Talks Stage
Libreria de Satoshi
Formerly known as the Bitcoin LARP, join us for a Bitcoin Work(shop) where we walk through how nodes work in real time.
Venue: Main Stage
Base58
Base58⛓️🔓
A workshop that teaches developers how lightning works and how to build a node using LDK. This is a condensed version of a longer, multi-day course. At btc++ we’ll focus on "Intro to Payment Channels". This workshop walks developers through how to build a Lightning channel. We start with the concept of simply sending off-chain transactions to a peer via email or text, and then we work our way towards adding components one-by-one (ex: multi-sig, spending paths, timelocks, revocation keys). With each step, we discuss the shortcomings of channel constructions that don't work well, and we'll eventually make our way to a robust Lightning Channel. The entire workshop is in Replit, so students will build funding, commitment, and HTLC transactions and broadcast them themselves into a regtest environment running in the background.
Venue: Talks Stage
Spiral Grantee