Touted as a way to make the world's most valuable cryptocurrency a more effective payment method, bitcoin's lightning network has a rather large obstacle ahead – it's still challenging, even risky, to set up and use.
It could become easier, though, should developers at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the prestigious international group that creates standards for the web, have anything to do with it.
The work, which has been ongoing for several years (since standards take a long time to release), looks to make online payments easier, while giving users more choice by making a variety of payment methods available in web browsers using an API – and that includes the lightning network.