Spiral is on mission to facilitate Bitcoin’s adoption globally

Spiral, formerly Square’s Crypto, recently went through rebranding shortly after the parent company, Square changed its name to Block. The financial company belonging to former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is on a clearly charted out path to push Bitcoin’s Adoption on a global scale.

Why spiral had to rebrand

Spiral issued a statement on the change from Square to assert its independence from the parent company.

Having Square in its name brought confusion regarding the nature of the link between Spiral and Block, formerly Square, with some alluding that the connection was stronger than it actually is.

Spiral also had to drop the ‘crypto’ in Square’s Crypto when it changed its name since it sole focus on the cryptocurrency bitcoin, and this did not represent Spiral’s mission on Bitcoin’s advancement. In a tweet by the parent company Block, Spiral represents bitcoin’s growth from a singular point, just like a spiral.

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Steve Lee, Spiral’s lead developer highlighted the fact that Spiral has been operating independently in its Bitcoin Mission despite being under the Block umbrella. Spiral makes all decisions regarding the management of its team, utilization of resources, and its activities. This means that Block and its CEO Jack Dorsey do not decide how Spiral runs its Bitcoin Mission.

The path towards adoption, lined by developers

Developers at Spiral are working around the clock to build applications that interface with mainstream monetary systems. Steve adds that the singular role of Spiral is to bring about a better user experience which will, in turn, raise the rate of adoption for daily use of Bitcoin.

As such, Spiral is seeking to drive this adoption by leveraging developers by facilitating them in applications development. Lee notes that the creation of infrastructure and development tools will ultimately enable developers to create improved user experiences while ensuring network security and privacy.

Digital gold

One of the major hurdles standing in Spiral’s independent mission on global bitcoin adoption is a view held by many people that bitcoin is digital gold. Spiral’s life mission is to have everyone around the globe be able to pay in bitcoin daily.

Lee posits that while the long-term goal for adoption is currency, it will start with owning the currency. While many bitcoin enthusiasts disagree with the narrow view of bitcoin as digital gold, scaling is needed to have the P2P asset transit into a universal currency. Spiral is at the heart of this agenda and is motivated to see Bitcoin enter the new phase via the Lightning network.

Spiral hopes to achieve this by assisting developers to ensure Bitcoin Lightning functions on their apps. Spiral will develop libraries with developer tools that will ensure the implementation of the same. This in turn will enable the feasibility of Bitcoin use for people who have no knowledge of development.

In El Salvador, this is already happening with the El Salvador government declaring Bitcoin as legal tender in the last quarter of the year 2021. This however is not yet possible in other jurisdictions where people struggle with scaling on the Lightning network. A huge opportunity exists for Spiral.

The problem lies with the current implementation of Lightning Wallets. Currently, each lightning wallet needs its own process of customizing the user experience. Lee notes that is a hectic issue for developers and it makes it even harder for developers to deliver user experience required and simultaneously satisfy issues of security and privacy while maintaining performance.

To solve this, Lee revealed that Spiral is working on Lightning Development Kit (LDK). Once complete LDK will free developers from focusing on performance, privacy, and security and dedicate their skills to user experience. Lee says that this made possible since developers will no longer need to spend hours learning a different programming language that runs the protocols in the Lightning network. LDK works by enabling faster and seamless integration of the scaling protocol for Bitcoin. This it does by abstracting low-level Lightning development concepts. Lee adds, “LDK even allows developers to provide their own custom peer scoring, customize the payment pre-image generation and create custom channel scripts,”

An effective and reliable base effective layer is a prerequisite for a good scaling technology. Spiral is also working on BDK (Bitcoin Development Kit), a kit for developers to propel their work on Bitcoin’s Base layer. Together, LDK and BDK enables developers to focus on both layers, the on-chain portions as well as the off-chain portions of the Lightning Wallet. They form a fantastic collabo that is a godsend for developers.

A future built by developers

Spiral hopes to attract more developers working on the same to enable them achieve global adoption. This means that testing and patching of applications will be dramatically easier. Spiral also intends to fund open source projects by Bitcoin developers. This it will achieve by providing grants for developers to focus on scaling, user experience, security and privacy on the Lightning protocol. The link for developer grant applications is already live on the company’s website.

If successful, Spiral will trigger other organizations in the Bitcoin ecosystem to follow suit and development of better blockchain applications for Bitcoin and possibly other cryptocurrencies. With Bitcoin mining almost coming to an end, the importance of investment in better infrastructure and blockchain apps has never been so important. Going forward, miners will have to repurpose their powerful mining rigs towards hosting and providing developer environments for app development on the Bitcoin ecosystem.