Interstellar Announces the Release of Starlight Demo, a Payment Channel for XML Transfers

Interstellar has released a demo of Starlight, a bidirectional payment channel on the Stellar network. The channel is expected to allow parties to transact securely and privately without paying a dime for fees.

The Starlight payment system is very much similar to the Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, which also guarantees instant payments, low cost, and cross blockchains atomic swaps.

Previously, payments made on the Stellar network involved publishing all the details of transactions, which would then wait for the network to reach a consensus in order for confirmation to go through. This in turn attracted a small fee

With the new Starlight Payment channel, process transactions will be done differently. The network works by locking up some funds to be used by those participating, allowing the parties to pay each other directly without necessarily involving the network. This makes them instant, free and private.

According to Interstellar, payments made on the Starlight system are completely secured, even though the transactions may not necessarily need publishing by the network. What happens is that when a channel is closed by a participant, the settlement transactions are sent to each of their Stellar accounts respectively, taking into account the history of the payments.

However, once a channel is closed, only the final balance is revealed on the network, with all other activities remaining private.

The released Starlight Payment channel is just an early demonstration. The project’s team expects to have a few bugs as it gets tested, which include incompatible upgrades. It however stresses that as of now, the system only connects to the Stellar testnet, and not the main net. The team noted that:

“Until we work out the kinks, Starlight connects only to the Stellar testnet, not the mainnet, to eliminate the risk of losing real funds to a software bug. Please do not attempt to use this application with the Stellar mainnet.”

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