The Lightning Network has been heralded as casting a ray of hope on bitcoins issues. The main problem is nobody knows if many developers are working on the project and whether it will ever be a reality? The CEO of Lightning Labs, Elizabeth Stark, suggested there may only be a handful of developers working full-time on implementing the technology.

If this is true, it\'s certainly a concern for those pinning their hopes on it. With that amount of developers and the lack of information surrounding the whole project, it doesn\'t look like the network is going to be launching anytime soon. Despite all of this a competition has been launched by the bsafe.network which is a group of 26 universities.

The idea is to get people to evaluate the two-layer-two technologies of Bitcoin, and of course, Lightning is one of these. Prizes have not yet been announced, but the contest is looking to draw in the best brains from universities and business to measure the privacy and security of the network.

Whether this level of scrutiny will kick-start the quest to get Lightning up and running remains to be seen, and most Lightning Network developers say only dummy coins should be used on the testnet, although some have begun to play for real using Bitcoins.