Voltage Aims To Bring Bitcoin’s Lightning Network To Every Business In The

By Finance News On Mar 2, 2025

Founder: Graham Krizek

Date Founded: October 2020

Location of Headquarters: Wichita, Kansas

Number of Employees: 17

Public or Private? Private

In 2012, soon after Graham Krizek discovered Bitcoin and subsequently began contributing to Bitcoin Core and building his own applications on Bitcoin, he noticed an issue that was hindering Bitcoin builders.

“The problem that I saw was that everyone was building everything from scratch — over and over and over again,” Krizek told Bitcoin Magazine. “There was no cloud environment where you could just spin up Bitcoin infrastructure and be able to start developing against it.”

At the time, Krizek didn’t feel compelled to act on this issue, though. He was still primarily focused on his career as a software engineer outside of the Bitcoin space, working for various startups as well as companies as large as Salesforce, while contributing to Bitcoin in his free time.

But something shifted within him when he learned about the Lightning Network.

He saw its potential and knew that it would have to be made easier to use if it were to be widely adopted.

“When I found Lightning, I said to myself ‘Okay, this is the next phase of Bitcoin adoption, the thing that’s going to really drive it to the next level,” said Krizek.

“Then, I saw the same pattern happening as I did with Bitcoin. Everyone kept starting from scratch while building, but the problems were more intense because Lightning is that much more complicated,” he added.

“I was like ‘We need a cloud provider where you can just click a button and have a Lightning node running and maintained for you.’ It can just be there so we can develop applications and build the projects we want to build much easier, much faster.”

And so Krizek got to work in creating such a product.

He shared the initial iteration of it with friends and acquaintances, many of whom began using it so much that the project demanded more of his attention.

“The usage grew to a point where I was like, ‘Man, I either need to shut this down because I can’t maintain it anymore or I need to turn this into a business and do it for real,’” said Krizek.

He decided on the latter, and by late 2020, he’d founded Voltage.

How Voltage Works

Voltage abstracts away the complexities of using Lightning by allowing users to deploy a Lightning node and spin up a channel in just a few clicks.

While Voltage hosts your node in its cloud, its public key, peers, channels, balance and transactions all remain private, as all of the traffic routed through the node is transferred via Tor.

While your node is running in the Voltage cloud, which is supported by the Google Cloud and several other cloud service providers, Voltage also helps users manage liquidity and offers other forms of customer support.

Essentially, Voltage abstracts away the difficulties of engaging with…