- Pierre Rochard’s Neutrino program lets users make Bitcoin (BTC) payments from Excel.
- The Neutrino program uses the Lightning Network (LN) to allow users to send and receive BTC from Excel, but it is said to be in beta form.
- When the LN technology evolves and matures, it can potentially solve the scalability problem facing Bitcoin.
Pierre Rochard, software engineer and the Founder of Bitcoin Advisory announced in Twitter claiming that he had developed a Microsoft Excel plugin that will enable users to make BTC payments from the spreadsheet.
Lightning Network Supported by Software Neutrino
Rochard explained that the software Neutrino, which is built on top of the Lightning Network (LN) protocol, lets users make payments via the LN without requiring them to operate a full node. According to him, “users can make and receive LN payments with a few clicks” in MS Excel.
Rochard’s tweet stated:
“The LND node software now runs from *within* the Excel plugin. With neutrino, that means that a Windows + Excel user can be making and receiving LN payments with a few clicks.”
Just to note that there are different implementations of the LN protocol, what Rochard was referencing to is the Lighting Network Daemon (LND), which at this stage is released as a beta version.
Early Stages of Development
According to the CryptoGlobe’s report in August, Andreas Brekken, the CEO of Shitcoin, he revealed that based on his experience with the LN, it had many glitches and thought it to be “impractical even for highly technical users.” There was just such a high rate of transaction failure and the codebase has numerous bugs.
Only for “Power Users”
Richard further explained that the LN-enabled Excel extension was “not for everyone”. He added that the program was specifically developed for the “power users”, which means that only more experienced Excel users can use it.
As soon as Rochard tweeted about the Neutrino, he pointed out that almost all professionals in the finance and accounting use Microsoft Excel program for their work.
“The user interface of open, decentralized finance is @msexcel. A plugin is tablestakes for any crypto project.”
With that, he felt the importance to having a LN-enabled solution for MS Excel because users send payments regularly on this medium. The plugin is also open source, so it will be subject to modifications and improvements by the community.
The plugin is still not publicly available, with no definitely date of release although it is hinted at that it could be as early as November.
