Blockchain, a bitcoin startup company, has announced the release of the alpha version of its Thunder Network – the first usable implementation of the Lightning network for off chain bitcoin payments that settles back to the main bitcoin blockchain.

“The ThunderNetwork is a way to send money “off-chain” to other parties in a trustless manner based on the lightning.network”, the website reads.

The startup said that it was particularly interested in the idea of using smart contracts to build “super-charged” payments networks, as outlined in a white paper by the lightning.network team. It said that the Thunder Network has the potential to facilitate secure, trustless, and instant payments and the ability to unleash the power of microtransactions, to allow the bitcoin network to handle heavy loads, and to increase user privacy.

From a feature perspective, there is both a node and a wallet (with GUI) present. Blockchain said that on the basis of the tests conducted so far, it is able to achieve better-than-Visa scale (100,000 TPS) with only a few thousand nodes on the network. In addition, the network will facilitate extremely cheap payments, as fees will develop naturally due to the free market in an open and permissionless network and will fundamentally be lower than on-chain payments.

In the Thunder Network, all communications between all nodes and wallets are encrypted using AES-CTR and take place only after completing authentication. Also, Payment Channels can be opened and closed at will, with transactions settling onto the bitcoin blockchain. The network will settle payments automatically, with no need for manual intervention. The settlement will ripple back through the network to provide proof-of-payment.

Blockchain explains that across the route, each hop will renegotiate a new status with the next hop, as a payment makes its way through the network with cryptography in place to prevent fraud. The network will relay payments over multiple nodes in the network automatically, using encrypted routing. No one knows who made a payment, allowing for more privacy.

“The current Thunder prototype is best suited for transactions among a trusted network of users”, said Blockchain, adding that it is alpha testing software.