// block 513649 · bitcoin · 15 March 2018
Lightning Labs releases lnd for mainnet
The moment this block marks: the publication of lnd 0.4-beta on GitHub, 15 March 2018, 14:59:39 UTC. The first block mined after it is block 513,649, 15 March 2018, 15:07:50 UTC.
The Lightning Network moves payments off the chain. Two parties lock bitcoins in a shared channel, then exchange signed updates of its balance as often as they like, and payments can be routed across several channels; only the opening and the closing of a channel need a transaction in a block. The design had waited for SegWit, which in August 2017 fixed the malleability of transaction identifiers.
Several teams were building implementations. On 15 March 2018 at 14:59 UTC, Lightning Labs published lnd 0.4-beta on GitHub, the first release of its software with the option to run on Bitcoin's main network, with real money. Olaoluwa Osuntokun's announcement called it the first Lightning mainnet beta, meant for developers, technical users and future operators of routing nodes, and asked them to experiment with small amounts only.
Lightning had run on mainnet before: some enthusiasts had used earlier versions of lnd there, and the release asked them to close those channels before upgrading. What changed was that the developers now presented the software as ready for it. The release added support for bitcoind as a backend, a new wallet seed format and a great deal of work on fault tolerance, with thanks to more than sixty contributors.
Block 513,649 was mined about eight minutes after the release was published, at 15:07 UTC. Lightning channels open and close through transactions in blocks like this one. Its hash, like every hash, can be checked on any node.
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