Founder: Jesse Schladder and Anthony Potdevin
Date established: March 2021
Head office location: Nashville, Tennessee
Number of employees: 10
Website: https://amboss.tech/
Public or private? Private
Jesse Shrader believes this will be a significant year for the Lightning network.
With Bitcoin prices rising and Tethers (USDT) reaching lightning, Shraddar assumes that more and more businesses and institutions will begin to see lightning for future payments.
And his company, Amboss, is poised to help make this vision come to fruition.
“We hope to expand Bitcoin as a payment system and use lightning to do that,” Shraddar told Bitcoin Magazine. “We want lightning to be a highly efficient, high-performance system.
Through the tools and services suite developed by the Shrader and Amboss teams, they are ready to ride the next wave of institutional users, especially now that USDT is running on Lightning.
What Amboss does
Amboss primarily uses the Lightning network to provide an intelligent payment infrastructure for digital payments.
“We provide people with insight into what to do to make payments more efficient on the network,” Shraddar said.
To achieve this, they offer many products and services.
One of the most notable of these is the Lightning Network Explorer, which employs machine learning to help users retrieve or connect information about any node on the network.
Beyond analytical software, Amboss offers its customers tools and services to improve lightning's liquidity conditions.
One such service is Magma Marketplace. This allows users to buy and sell liquidity on the Lightning network. Magma allows users to provide liquidity without waiving Bitcoin custody.
The other is Hydro, an extension of magma. This software allows users to automate liquidity purchases and make payments more successful.
(And Amboss also offers Reflex, a compliance suite for business customers with AML (Money Laundering Anti-Money Laundering) obligations.)
Amboss' Analytics software and tools are built for a large number of transactions and are easy to create with lightning.
“We measure the ability of a business to pay with simulation,” explained Shraddar. “We help businesses see how much network they can actually reach when they try to pay.”
Lightning condition
Shraddha is optimistic about the growth of lightning. As days go by, users are relying on their networks to send more than just micropayments.
“We have successfully processed our daily lightning payments, which defines payments between $10 and $4,000,” Schladder said. “We are working to further enhance the functionality of our network, with a focus on decentralization.”
Processing payments over $4,000 remains difficult. Shraddha explained that more capital is needed to make a bigger payment a reality.
However, he also said that recent rise in Bitcoin prices has helped larger payments be processed more easily.
“What I've seen recently is the rise in Bitcoin prices, which has improved payment capabilities across all lightning channels,” Schladder said. “The channel is a bitcoin sect, so it seems the pipe has grown.”
And while Shraddar is optimistic about these big pipes, allowing for more throughput, he also believes that when tethers (USDTs) come to lightning, it will attract more fluidity to the network.
Lightning Tether (USDT)
Late last month, Lightning Labs announced that it will bring USDT to Bitcoin and the Lightning network via Taproot Assets Protocol.
This upgrade will allow Bitcoin service providers to more easily integrate and accept USDT. I believe this will benefit Shrader from Lightning.
“One of the very clear things is that tethers are suitable for the product market,” Schladder said.
“Last year, it provided a $10 trillion payment, which is more than Visa and Mastercard,” he added.
“It's very clear that the world wants the US dollar.”
Pragmatist Shradar admits the fact that many hard-core bitcoiners are having problems running USDT with Bitcoin and lightning, and appreciates Bitcoin's healthy money qualities, so he I sympathize with you.
At the same time, he believes that the advantages of having USDT on lightning clearly outweigh the disadvantages, as he is not happy with its volatility as he still doesn't understand what Bitcoin is.
“Many people are not taking orange pills yet and don't get to understand the benefits of Bitcoin,” he explained.
“I think Bitcoin is an incredible tool. I want to bring it to as many people as possible. That said, traditional payments have a lot of issues and are very safe for Bitcoin. “There's an auditable system. This is something I want to bring to the world at scale,” he added.
“The price action on Bitcoin is great for me, but a lot of people are afraid of volatility. If you have an asset with very low volatility like USDT, it's currently very safe and unreliable. On the rails, that's a big win.”
Issues that Lightning USDT solves
Shraddar spoke about how the first hosted Bitcoin-related conference microstrategy is actually called “corporate lightning.” At the meeting, businesses were encouraged to start paying Bitcoin employees rather than lightning.
“What the employers realized was that everything in 1099 was a hassle when they had to submit to employees,” Shraddar said. “And there was a lot of bunch of regulators that they had to contest too.”
Shraddar can reduce accounting and regulatory headaches to USDT employees than lightning, but also reduce some of the counterparty risks associated with bank use.
“Our salary was going through Silicon Valley Bank,” Schladder said.
“And at one point, my payroll provider contacted me and tried to pay the staff and then resubmitted my midterm payroll. I lost the half-moon runway. This is what I did. It was all because Silicon Valley Bank is insolvent,” he added.
“So if I can avoid counterparty risk in the financial system by moving to Bitcoin and lightning, that means I'm in a much better place.”
[Author’s note: Some counterparty risk still exists when using USDT, as you have to trust that Tether holds actual U.S. dollars to back the tokenized ones it issues.]
risk
Shraddar pointed out some of the risks of Bitcoin and Lightning USDT, but it doesn't seem to be too worried about them.
“If there are assets other than those that are traded in the chain, there are some MEV risks,” Schladder said. “But Bitcoin already has an ordinal inscription that creates other assets, so that's the problem already exists.”
He also didn't seem to be upset when I raised the risk of creating a bitcoin fork and making USDT worthless in one of the chains. Bitcoin in the US spot Bitcoin ETF chooses to support Bitcoin “tether fork”.
“The Bitcoin consensus is not determined by Bitcoin custody, so while key businesses like Coinbase may support a variety of changes and initiatives, protocol changes will be implemented. We don't guarantee it,” Shrader said.
Instead of focusing on the risks associated with Bitcoin's USDT, Shraddar does the opposite.
“What's even more interesting is the opportunity to unlock where Bitcoin itself is probably the actual arbitrage ability,” Shraddar said.
“All nodes can trade both USDT and Bitcoin, so they can exchange natively with lightning, so you can send Bitcoin from one Lightning channel and receive USDT on another Lightning channel.” He added.
“It's as easy as generating a USDT invoice and paying with BTC.
2025: The Year of Lightning
In Shraddha's final thoughts from my interview with him, he shared two important reasons why 2025 will be the year of lightning.
The first is that holding Bitcoin no longer requires lightning.
“Until this year, if people or businesses wanted to switch to lightning, they had to have Bitcoin first. That's a big barrier,” Shraddar explained. (Shrader was added in response to a follow-up question that accessing USDT is relatively easy and common outside of the US.)
“There is a very small market for Bitcoin-only for payment processing. But this year we have removed that barrier and consumers can pay with another asset, USDT. For that reason, it is already a big market. There is,” he added.
(Shrader also said that while USDT runs in Lightning Rails, Bitcoin is still profitable as USDT is converted to Bitcoin as it crosses the lightning bolt. “)
Additionally, Shrader noted that Lightning users only pay a small portion of what they used to pay with transaction fees using traditional financial rail.
“We supply liquidity at less than 0.5%,” Shraddar said.
“As a user of a large payment card network, I pay 4% for all of that payment processing. Money doesn't show up for days or weeks after payment is made,” he adds. Ta.
“Lightning reduces payment processing fees by almost ten times.”
Given the point of Shraddha, it is difficult to imagine 2025 not going to be a big year for lightning.
