Justin Sun hands the Bitcoin Lightning torch to Erik Voorhees after getting no response from Elon Musk and Kobe Bryant

Justin Sun has passed the Lightning torch over to ShapeShift exchange CEO Erik Voorhees following a failed attempt to pass it to NBA superstar Kobe Bryant and the Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk.

The Tron founder waited for a response for nearly 24 hours before passing the LNTrustchain to Voorhees.

In that time, Sun’s requests to Elon Musk, Kobe Bryant, and even Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum fell on deaf ears. Voorhees then accepted to carry on the tradition and pass it on to the next qualified recipient. After receiving the torch, Voorhees tweeted out saying, “I have never held so much power in my hands… will think of the appropriate next target.”

The experiment was started by crypto space explorer Hodlonaut. Bitcoin users have since been playing a running game wherein each participant adds a little Bitcoin to a Lightning Network payment chain then passes it on to someone on Twitter that they trust. This is being referred to as passing around a so-called “Lightning torch.”

The initiative was started in order to spread awareness of the Layer 2 Lightning Network technology, widely seen as the future of Bitcoin as it improves scalability and allows for instantly verifiable Bitcoin payments.

Coin Rivet recently brought you the story of Square and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey participating in the ongoing Lightning torch chain experiment.

Who was next after Voorhees?

Voorhees’s first target for the next recipient of the torch was ‘crypto mum’ and SEC commissioner Hester Peirce, but after she failed to respond to the ShapeShift boss in a timely manner, he then sent the chain on to former state legislator Keith Ammon – the man who first introduced Voorhees to Bitcoin all the way back in May 2011.

In a strange twist to the Lightning torch convention, Ammon then asked the founder of the torch Hodlonaut if he could fork the chain. In a jibe at the Bitcoin Cash project, Hodlonaut then told Ammon that he would need to call it LNTrustChain Cash.

The self-proclaimed blockchain geek then decided against this and instead decided to send the chain on to the man who told him about Bitcoin, Professor Darren Tapp.