Hodl Hodl exchange has announced upcoming support for Lightning Network-powered trading and prediction market on their non-custodial and peer-to-peer exchange.

The organisers of the famed Baltic Honeybadger Bitcoin conference in Latvia revealed a timeline of May and Summer 2019 to add support for trading and predictions over the Lighting Network respectively. The announcement was made on the Peter McCormack’s “What Bitcoin Did” podcast by the exchange’s CEO and CTO.

The update comes off the back of the project announcing that they were developing a Bitcoin-based prediction market back in late February this year.

Unlike the majority of decentralised prediction markets that are active today, Hodl Hodl’s offering will use multisig Bitcoin contracts that incorporate ‘Oracle’ signatories to make sure the markets will be fairly settled among prediction contract participants.

The exchange had previously said that every offer on the prediction market will be pre-moderated, and once an offer is approved, anyone will be able to create a contract with you based on your offer. In terms of user-controlled choices for the prediction, the user can set odds (between 1 and 10) and also minimum contract volume, as well as offer balance in a particular prediction market.

With the Bitcoins locked in multisig escrow, the exchange thinks that this approach should be “safer than keeping money on centralized exchanges” or other crypto-based prediction markets.

Growing infrastructure for the Lighting Network

Over the last couple of months, we have seen a growing amount of infrastructure and use cases emerge for the Lighting network. If Hodl Hodl could eventually release its prediction market via an API we could see it added to a growing list of ‘lapps’ being built into the marketplace of popular Lighting Network mobile wallets like BlueWallet.

We are still a couple of weeks away from the prediction platform launching and will have to wait until summer for Lightning support, but the future looks bright for this burgeoning ecosystem of non-custodial applications being developed on top of the Bitcoin protocol.