# Elizabeth Stark

> Elizabeth Stark is the co-founder and CEO of Lightning Labs, which develops open source Bitcoin and Lightning payment infrastructure. A Harvard Law graduate who previously taught at Stanford and Yale, she connects work on internet freedom, peer-to-peer technology and privacy with a goal of making global internet payments easier for people and software.

- **Role:** CEO and Co-Founder at Lightning Labs
- **Organizations:** Lightning Labs, Coin Center, Stanford University, Yale University, Harvard Free Culture Group, Students for Free Culture
- **Education:** BA in International Relations, Brown University, JD, Harvard Law School
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads Lightning Labs., Led the company through LND’s 2018 mainnet beta release., Announced Lightning Labs’ $10 million Series A in 2020 and $70 million Series B in 2022.

## Career timeline

- **2006** — An openDemocracy author biography identifies her as founder of the Harvard Free Culture Group and a board member of Freeculture.org.
- **2008** — Graduated from Harvard Law School.
- **2008-2009** — Listed as a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project.
- **2016** — Co-founded Lightning Labs; published a Lightning Network explainer at Coin Center in September.
- **2018** — Lightning Labs released the LND mainnet beta on March 15.
- **2020** — Announced a $10 million Series A and the beta of Lightning Loop, the company’s first paid product.
- **2022** — Announced a $70 million Series B and Taro, the asset protocol subsequently known as Taproot Assets.
- **2025** — With Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, announced plans to bring USDT to Bitcoin and Lightning.
- **2026** — Lightning Labs released Lightning agent tools in February and launched Wavelength on mainnet in October.

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads Lightning Labs.
- Led the company through LND’s 2018 mainnet beta release.
- Announced Lightning Labs’ $10 million Series A in 2020 and $70 million Series B in 2022.
- Founded the Harvard Free Culture Group.
- Helped co-organize the 2019 Lightning Conference in Berlin.

## Latest updates

- **2026-10** — Lightning Labs announced Wavelength on mainnet on October 23. The toolkit supports Bitcoin payments for people and agents; the announcement still describes it as alpha software and says stablecoins are coming later.
- **2026-02** — Lightning Labs open sourced seven composable agent skills and lnget for Lightning-based machine payments.
- **2025-06** — Taproot Assets v0.6 added improvements for asset payments and reiterated Stark and Ardoino’s USDT integration announcement.

## Links

- Website: https://elizabethstark.com/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/starkness
- GitHub: https://github.com/starkness

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/elizabeth-stark
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-24