Introducing: Breez
Welcome Breez to the ego death family!
They invented the concept of “Lightning Service Provider” (LSP). Now they invent “Lightning as a Service” (LAAS).
We always loved Breez
We had our eye on Breez from the moment we considered founding ego death capital. When we did our research to understand the ecosystem and all of the companies who were currently building, Breez stood out. They had created an easy to use non-custodial Lightning wallet, a point of sale system for accepting Bitcoin payments, as well as a podcasting platform. But more than that, they had been driving innovation in making Lightning usable for years, creating significant technological advances.
Breez has always focussed on making Bitcoin highly usable, and as easy to use as possible. This is the direction Bitcoin + Lightning need to go to win out over fiat and altcoins. And, Breez is non-custodial. Their end goal is for non-custodial options to be AS EASY as the fast and simple custodial options that have emerged.
It was always clear that Breez were the leaders in Lightning. And now we get to work with them!
Lightning for real people
First, let’s take a quick look back at where Breez came from. Breez was founded in 2018 by a team based in Tel Aviv, Israel. If you don’t follow CEO Roy Sheinfeld on Medium we reccommend you do - here is his profile. Roy has been writing about Lightning for years in an engaging and clear way (and always with great pictures + captions!).
Breez has ALWAYS been focussed on UX. On making Bitcoin easy + usable… while remaining non-custodial. This is what Breez stands for.
It was 2018 that Lightning Labs first launched the beta version of the Lightning Network - and the same year Breez got going, knowing that the “Lightning Network is the Future of Bitcoin”.
Roy said in 2019 “The only thing holding bitcoin back is the UX. Raw technical possibility is not the same thing as an attractive, engaging, useful experience for all users. But UX is a small term that hides great complexity. It implies many issues for which there are many solutions, each with advantages and disadvantages that different users will value in different ways.”
The company’s founding in 2018 kicked off a long road of technological innovation to get to where Breez is today. There is a huge amount of technology sitting behind the simple two lines of code that make it all look so easy. To understand some of the technical challenges Roy & the Breez team have overcome, read this post.
In early 2019, Breez released its first beta for iPhone and Android. In late 2019, they introduced the concept of the Lightning Service Provider.
“The similarities between the Lightning Network and the internet in many respects are striking. It’s no accident that the term Lightning Service Provider resembles Internet Service Provider. They’re similar in that they both connect users to a wider network, but different networks require different functions from their service providers.”
Applications drive adoption
But the question was, who would actually use Lightning? As with Bitcoin itself, with the iPhone, with the internet - Breez started with apps to drive adoption.
In March-2020 they introduced the Point of Sale solution for merchants to accept Bitcoin, while continuing to develop the underlying technology and challenges along the way. In 2021, the Breez Lightning client added a native podcast player with sats streaming.
The team saw massive increases in adoption thanks to the development of these apps, all the while learning about how people were using Lightning, coming up against and solving technical challenges, and developing a sense of where Lightning was going - and where Breez would go in the future.
They have been leading the charge in building the UX for Lightning for the last few years. And now, all that knowledge + technology is ready to be put to use to create the highly scalable SDK (Software Development Kit) - to enable companies to bypass the hard work of lightning integration and benefit from Breez’s expertise.
Source: Roy Sheinfeld via Medium
Breez’s new SDK makes Lightning usable - by anyone
Finally!
We have to remember, the Lightning Network is still in its infancy. And building on Lightning is hard. It requires specialized expertise.
Currently, using the Lightning Network requires a team of engineers to build and manage a node and related infrastructure. It’s like back before Shopify, when every online merchant needed to build a back-end infrastructure for managing payments from customers. It was really hard and there were numerous companies out there doing the same work to get to the same outcome.
Becoming a Lightning engineer is hard. It’s akin to a career change for programmers from other languages and ecosystems. So, before the Breez SDK, there were significant limitations to adoption of the Lightning Network and hence, Bitcoin.
Breez changes this
Now, any engineer can easily integrate payments via Lightning into their apps with a very shallow learning curve. Breez’s SDK manages everything that is needed - including on-chain interoperability, third-party fiat on-ramps, and other services users and operators need.
Decentralized + Secure = less scalable + functional… at least at the base layer
The slow nature of development on Bitcoin is of course a feature not a bug. It is absolutely crucial that if you are going to build a new global financial system, it needs to be based on THE MOST SOLID + SECURE foundation possible. It needs to be stable and predictable - which means decentralized. Any concentration of control or power leads to corruption, misaligned incentives and ultimately instability.
By prioritizing decentralization and security, Bitcoin by necessity has traded off scalability + functionality (at least at the base layer). So developers moved to other platforms to build services quickly - often without realizing that they were building on the quicksand of an insecure and/or centralized base.
With Lightning now emerging as a scaling solution on Layer 2 of Bitcoin, and Breez’s SDK, a world of opportunities opens for developers and businesses to build value on top of a decentralized and secure protocol - Bitcoin.
Which brings developers back to the ecosystem
According to the Electric Capital 2021 developer report, there were 18,000 monthly active developers in open source “crypto and web3”. Ethereum had 4,000 while Bitcoin had just 680. The report notes that “Polkadot, Solana, NEAR, BSC, Avalanche, and Terra are growing faster than Ethereum did at similar points in its history”. There are certainly problems with the data and it is not necessarily accurate, but it is probably in the right ballpark.
It’s time for developers to come back into the Bitcoin family.
One wallet. Many apps. How Lightning should be
Currently, how Lightning works is that for every new application you need a new lightning “wallet”. This is akin to needing to open a new bank account for every app on your phone, or for every website you shop at. And, you’d need to hold some funds in each of these accounts. Doesn’t sound like fun!
With Breez, now you just need to have one wallet, and all of the applications can connect to one wallet. Clean and simple, just the way it should be. Now, you can have “app-ification” of Lightning.
Since FTX everyone gets it… non-custodial is REALLY important
Perhaps it used to be easy to dismiss the “crazies” who were so focused on non-custodial solutions as “paranoid”, or “hardcore” Bitcoiners, or anything else altcoiners and no-coiners want to throw at them. The collapse of FTX changed this.
All of a sudden, it was clear to everyone - not just those of us inside Bitcoin - why non-custodial is crucial. Fundamental. People began to remember that the entire reason Bitcoin was created in the first place was to REMOVE trust in third parties.
So, from the perspective of how we want the Bitcoin ecosystem to look, Breez’s technology leads the way.
In summary
We are thrilled and honored to welcome Breez into the ego death family as our third investment. We can’t wait to see what the future holds - for Breez and for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.
As always, please reach out to us if you’d like to learn more or have any comments! Our inboxes are always open :)
From Andi, Jeff + Nico
#JoinTheEclipse