Bitcoin's Warrior Queen: How Lightning's Elizabeth Stark Raised an Army

After years of quiet building at her startup, Lightning Labs, 2018 has been a breakout year for both Stark and her company.

Stark is often described as a kind of warrior queen, who now commands an army of elite developers.

More broadly, Stark is also widely credited for turning her friend Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and co-founder of Square, into a bitcoin believer.

Dryja, who co-founded Lightning Labs with Stark then left the company in 2016, credited his former colleague for prioritizing quality over quantity.

Stark said she's driven by a desire to create "Significant technology that will have effects on the 10-year horizon and beyond." In her mind, lightning is a key part of ensuring bitcoin's longevity.

Another sign of her personality: no matter how busy she gets, Stark is generally responsive to chats in the LND Slack group, where developers and fans around the world collaborate, and which now has more than 2,870 members.

Stark co-organized the Crypto Springs conference in October, where more than half of the speakers were women, and scholarships for women to attend Bitcoin Core contributor Jimmy Song's programming bootcamp.

Mir Liponi, an Italian vlogger and co-founder of Blockchainlab, said meeting Stark at a Consensus conference in 2015 inspired her decision to take a more active role in Italy's bitcoin community.

Stepping back, to fully grasp Stark's work to bitcoin, it's important to remember that the lightning technology was conceived, and Lightning Labs founded, in the midst of a long-running and contentious debate within the bitcoin community over how best to scale the network.

Four months later, in March 2018, Lightning Labs released the beta version of LND. Today, Stark said there are now hundreds of developers making Lightning apps and contributing to the network's open source infrastructure.