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Lightlist.io Makes Lighthouse ‘Seamless’

Lightlist.io, the web portal for Lighthouse crowdfunding projects and winner of the 2015 Sunnyvale Job Fair hackathon allows users to seamlessly back Lighthouse projects.

During the 2015 Sunnyvale Bitcoin Job Fair #bithack hackathon, two PhD students from Germany, Julian Schwartz and Michael Ilg, added a range of features to Lightlist.io – the web portal for pledging funds to Lighthouse projects.

Created by Mike Hearn, Lighthouse is a decentralized core platform that must be run locally – there is no web app, and it can’t be accessed via a browser. The open-source crowdfunding platform was never designed with end user functionality in mind. When Hearn released the core platform, he expressed his expectation that third party services would add functionality, “We think that web developers will be able to do a great job of providing social and community building features when freed from the hassle of securely managing money by Lighthouse” states Hearn.

As winners of the #bithack hackathon, Julian and Michael have developed exactly what Hearn expected, an easy solution for users to pledge funds to Lighthouse projects – without having to install and run the decentralized core platform.

“We make decentralized crowdfunding through Lighthouse seamless by providing a content discovery service, a webapp client, currency agnostic and social pledging.”
— – Lightlist.io

Prior to Lightlist, to make a pledge on a Lighthouse project you needed to  download the Lighthouse client, install & run it locally, scour the internet to find a project file, load it into Lighthouse, and then send bitcoin. Lightlist deals with these technological barriers with their gallery web discovery platform. A curated list of Lighthouse campaigns is displayed, and you can pledge by simply sending bitcoin to the QR code shown for the project.

“We wanted to provide a service that would be useful for the Bitcoin community, and since there was no other content discovery service available, we decided to make one. We weren’t happy with the user experience of having to download a project file, then to fire up the Lighthouse client and import it, so we integrated pledging from the browser.”
— – Julian Schwartz, LightList Co-Founder and Technical Lead

During the #bithack hackathon two other API’s were integrated into the Lightlist platform, ChangeTip and ShapeShift.io. The ChangeTip API provides social micro-pledging, on release of the feature, users will be able to pledge funds to a lighthouse project by mentioning the projects hashtag when tipping @lightlistio – across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Disqus, and any other platform that ChangeTip supports.

Lightlist will pool all ChangeTip microtips into one larger pledge, opening the field of decentralized crowdfunding to a much larger audience. The inclusion of ShapeShift.io will allow users to pledge with any of the 28 different alternative crypto currencies that ShapeShift supports, opening up the Lighthouse audience even further. The integration of ChangeTip and ShapeShift is currently in Beta testing.

To facilitate further integration ShapeShift asked the team at Lightlist to open source shiftUI, a universal bitcoin QR code generator. “shiftUI allows you to accept bitcoin, while your users send you altcoin, via a single dynamic QR code.” Julian explains.

Julian tells us that they are also working with BitGo for multi-signature wallet support, to ensure the pledged funds can only go to the project owner. “BitGo didn’t support the signature type needed for Lighthouse at the moment of the hackathon, so we couldn’t integrate it yet. We will be working with BitGo to implement multi-signature wallets to ensure that the tipped coins can only be sent to the project they were intended for.”

As with the Lighthouse core platform, LightList doesn’tt hold anybodys private keys. The key pair is generated by the users browser, and that never leaves the local computer. A transaction is then initiated for the pledged amount. This transaction can only be completed when the project is 100% funded. Users can withdraw a pledge at any time, by sweeping the private key.

Julian enjoyed his experience as a participant of the Sunnyvale Bitcoin Job Fair #bithack hackathon. Working with the three different API’s, and their respective technical support, has clearly been a productive event.

“I was impressed by how responsive and willing to help each of the teams behind the APIs were. They were all helpful and responsive through the night, it was a blast.”
— – Julian

Lightlist.io is currently up and running, while the team of two developers continue to work on features. “In this community, it really doesn’t matter what your background is. It just matters what you contribute.” – Julian


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