Jack Dorsey's Square Crypto announced the allocation of another grant for the development of Bitcoin's Layer 2 network, Lightning Network's infrastructure. It was received by the Spanish developers' team Talaia, working on the service The Eye of Satoshi.
Related: Square Crypto gives grants to two Bitcoin developers
The Eye of Satoshi is the so-called Watchtower, a solution designed to provide an additional guarantee that users will not be deceived by their counterparties.
If your LN software is "offline”—as in it isn't actively monitoring the blockchain—you need a 3rd party that can keep watch for you. This could be because you’re running a lightweight wallet, aren’t actively using your wallet, or your LN node crashes. This is what watchtowers do.
— Square Crypto (@sqcrypto) June 1, 2020
The service being developed also increases censorship resistance, making it difficult for certain types of attacks. Despite the fact that the solution involves some compromises in terms of decentralization, Square Crypto believes that the development of technology is still at an early stage and, in general, the Lightning Network will benefit from experiments with various watchtowers.
The Eye of Satoshi is already working with C-Lightning, and will continue to support other LN implementations.
Square Crypto did not name the grant amount, but this is the sixth grant in a row that Square's crypto unit allocates to BTC developers. The first of these in the amount of $100,000 was received by the BTCPay Foundation, the developer of the BTCPayServer processing service.