| STATIC ADDRESSES: The lightning network has taken a big step toward a better user experience courtesy of new work by one of its principal open-source developers.
Widely believed to be the key to helping the cryptocurrency reach a mainstream audience by pushing it to handle millions of transactions, lightning still isn't exactly safe to use yet. No less important is that the current way of generating addresses for accepting payments is not as easy or dynamic as it could be.
But that’s starting to change. Lightning Labs CTO Olaoluwa Osuntokun recently released a rough draft of a code change that would allow users to accept an address that doesn’t need to change each time. It’s a proof of concept, showing that payments can be made with a static address.
“I think it’s a really cool feature. Alice can send to Bob without Bob expecting it or having to do anything at all. Which is cool because it removes some friction,” Osuntokun told CoinDesk.
The feature might be good for games or tips, he added – scenarios where people don't necessarily need all the details an invoice provides. Full Story
TORCH HOLDERS: In other lightning news, a Twitter-based experiment with the network continues to see support from some big name individuals and firms.
The latest to receive a payment in a chain of transaction now known as the ”Lightning Torch” are the digital assets team at financial giant Fidelity Investments and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, both of whom joined the effort in the last few days. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey notably passed the torch on in January.
The Lightning Torch showcases the technology, with Twitter accounts receiving the “torch” – a lightning payment – and passing it on after adding a nominal amount of bitcoin to the total. The experiment has also been called the “LN Trust Chain,” since current holders are supposed to send it on to someone they trust will send the payment on, rather than keep it to themselves.
So far the torch has passed through at least 137 countries and has been held 224 times, according to a site set up to track the chain of transactions. A total of 3,700,000 satoshis (a small division of a bitcoin) have been sent, a sum worth around $143. Full Story
WALLET DEAL: Voyager, a crypto brokerage platform that launched and went public this month, has agreed to buy wallet startup Ethos.io for about $4 million.
Announced Thursday, the deal would give Voyager a range of products developed by Singapore-based Ethos, including the Ethos Universal Wallet and the blockchain platform Ethos Bedrock.
Voyager said it will also pick up an allocation of Ethos tokens, which the target company, formerly known as Bitquence, issued through an initial coin offering (ICO) in July 2017, raising $1.6 million.
As part of the deal, Shingo Lavine, founder and CEO of Ethos, will become Voyager's chief innovation officer and join the company's board, and Ethos' former owners will have the right to nominate one director for appointment to the Voyager board at each annual general meeting, once they have amassed at least 3.5 million shares.
The two startups partnered last October to add a self-custody option for Voyager’s users, as well as allowing Ethos users to convert, store and trade cryptocurrencies via Voyager. Full Story | 
Lightning strikes twice