Former MicroStrategy CEO Micheal Saylor — who had turned the once-dormant software company into a crypto juggernaut — has decided to get the non-crypto portion of the business involved with bitcoin-related initatives.
Saylor announced at the Baltic Honeybadger conference that the company’s developers are preparing solutions that would enable massive numbers of individuals to participate in the Lightning network, a payment network on top of bitcoin that allows faster and less expensive transactions
Saylor made the announcement that he was resigning as CEO of MicroStrategy on August 2, but he kept his post as board chairman and adopted the new title of executive chairman.
He predicted that his successor would be able to concentrate on the company’s software division as he continued to promote bitcoin. Now it seems like at least a portion of that software firm will be put to use in making it simpler for individuals to use bitcoin, which might raise the value of the Bitcoin the business now holds.
Saylor described Lightning as “the most important thing going on in the world in technology” while addressing the audience via video call.
MicroStrategy, according to him, is searching for solutions that would enable businesses to “roll out Lightning to a hundred thousand employees every day” or “open Lightning wallets for 10 million customers overnight.”
It’s still extremely early in the process, and Saylor said it’s too soon to tell if any marketable items would emerge from it.
Saylor, a longtime supporter of the Lightning Protocol, reaffirmed his belief in the technology’s promising future. He stated that Lightning does not only scale up bitcoin for multitudes of people, or reduce the transaction cost to almost zero. Lightning also provides much more leeway when developing functionality and more opportunities to take risks — especially considering that the ethos of bitcoin is to proceed with caution and not move too hastily on the base layer without universal consensus.
