# Lightning Projects at AI Tinkerers

> Canonical HTML: https://aitinkerers.org/technologies/lightning
> Markdown URL: https://aitinkerers.org/technologies/lightning.md
> Technology record last updated: 2026-03-24T15:18:17Z
> Generated: 2026-08-24T08:49:45Z

Lightning is Bitcoin's Layer 2 protocol: it delivers instant, high-volume, low-cost transactions, bypassing blockchain confirmation times.

The Lightning Network (LN) is a decentralized Layer 2 payment protocol built on the Bitcoin blockchain, engineered to solve the core scalability problem. It utilizes bidirectional payment channels and smart contracts to facilitate off-chain transactions, achieving speeds measured in milliseconds to seconds. This capability allows the network to handle millions to billions of transactions per second, dramatically exceeding legacy payment systems. By settling payments off-chain, the LN drastically reduces transaction fees, making instant micropayments and cross-chain atomic swaps (with compatible chains) economically viable, thereby restoring Bitcoin's utility as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

- Official technology site: https://lightning.network
- Public AI Tinkerers demos and talks: 1
- Result page: 1 of 1

## Recent Public Talks and Demos

### [Building Interactive Worlds with VAEs and JEPA](https://toronto.aitinkerers.org/talks/rsvp_UL1Li1c7ki0)

I'm working on using VAEs and I-JEPA to generate worlds you can move through. The goal is to teach a model to both imagine and understand/predict how they change as you explore. I will show a custom VAE that generates novel scenes from GTA5 and a custom implementation of I-JEPA that's learning the world dynamics. The goal is to use them together to predict the next frame based on input. The VAE I'll show is custom and I will focus in on the loss calculation to show the reconstruction loss via the KL Divergence. I'll also show the outputs of the model with different latent dimensions (i.e. too big vs too small vs just right). For I-JEPA I'll compare and contrast it against the VAE and why it's different. I'll use a Notebook to illustrate how the algorithm works and 🤞a decoder to show how what it has learnt about the world.

- Event context: AI Tinkerers Toronto - June 2025 Meetup at NEXT Canada -- sponsored by Intel AI! — 2025-06-18 — Toronto
- Public talk page: https://toronto.aitinkerers.org/talks/rsvp_UL1Li1c7ki0

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