Graham Krizek, Founder & CEO of Voltage – Interview Series

Graham Krizek, Founder & CEO of Voltage: is a technologist and entrepreneur focused on scaling Bitcoin infrastructure through the Lightning Network. Since founding Voltage in 2020, he has led efforts to expand real-world Bitcoin use cases and bridge traditional finance with next-generation payment systems. Previously, he served as a Senior Software Engineer at Salesforce and held roles in quantitative engineering, site reliability, and cloud architecture, building a strong foundation in distributed systems and scalable infrastructure.

Voltage is a Bitcoin infrastructure company focused on making the Lightning Network accessible, scalable, and enterprise-ready. The platform provides managed services that simplify deploying and operating Lightning nodes, enabling businesses to integrate fast, low-cost Bitcoin payments without deep technical overhead. By abstracting the complexity of Lightning infrastructure, Voltage is helping accelerate adoption across fintech, exchanges, and traditional financial institutions exploring real-time digital payments.

You transitioned from engineering roles at Salesforce, Ikigai Asset Management, and NodeSource into founding Voltage in 2020. What gap did you see in Bitcoin infrastructure that pushed you to build a Lightning Network platform for enterprises?

Voltage started by solving my own problem. As a developer, I wanted to add Bitcoin payments to the applications I was building, and I kept running into the same wall: there was no clean way to do it without standing up the entire infrastructure stack yourself. Every team building on Bitcoin or Lightning was reinventing the same wheel, and most of them were burning months on infrastructure instead of shipping product. That gap was the opportunity. I built the platform I wished existed, and it turned out a lot of other teams had been waiting for the same thing.

Voltage focuses on making the Lightning Network usable for real businesses. What are the biggest technical barriers enterprises still face when moving from experimentation to production?

It is often not what people expect. The hardest barrier is not the cryptography or the node operations. It is the finance and operations side, reconciling Bitcoin and Lightning balances against every other asset on the balance sheet. For a CFO, that is a real problem, because Lightning liquidity behaves differently than cash or traditional payment float. That is exactly what we address with our credit product. We give enterprises flexibility in how they fund and manage Lightning liquidity, so the treasury team can plan around it instead of fighting it. Once that piece clicks, the path from pilot to production gets dramatically shorter.

Lightning is often positioned as the key to scaling Bitcoin for payments. What has changed in recent years that makes enterprise adoption more realistic today?

Two things have changed. The first is tooling. The products and services around Lightning are dramatically more mature than they were even a couple of years ago, and the bridges between Lightning and traditional finance have closed most of the integration gap that used to scare enterprises off. The second is operational track record. Platforms like ours have now been running Lightning infrastructure at scale for years, through market cycles and real transaction volume. Enterprises no longer have to take a leap of faith. They can point to live deployments, real SLAs, and real settlement data. That is what makes today different.

From an infrastructure perspective, how do you approach liquidity management and routing reliability, which have historically been major challenges for Lightning deployments?

Two things have changed. The first is tooling. The products and services around Lightning are dramatically more mature than they were even a couple of years ago, and the bridges between Lightning and traditional finance have closed most of the integration gap that used to scare enterprises off. The second is operational track record. Platforms like ours have now been running Lightning infrastructure at scale for years, through market cycles and real transaction volume. Enterprises no longer have to take a leap of faith. They can point to live deployments, real SLAs, and real settlement data. That is what makes today different.

Voltage now supports both Bitcoin and stablecoin settlement. How do you see these two systems evolving together within Lightning-based payments?

Bitcoin and stablecoins serve different markets, and both are valuable. Stablecoins are clearly taking off as a global settlement rail, especially for dollar-denominated flows and cross-border use cases. At the same time, there are plenty of businesses that genuinely want to transact in Bitcoin itself, whether for treasury reasons, audience preference, or specific verticals like iGaming where Bitcoin is already the native unit of account. Our view is that the future is not one or the other. It is a Lightning-based settlement layer that can move both, and businesses should not have to choose their rail based on which asset they want to support.

Many fintechs and neobanks are exploring instant settlement. How does Lightning compare to traditional payment rails like ACH, SWIFT, or card networks in terms of cost, speed, and finality?

They are not in the same ballpark. Lightning can settle a payment in under half a second, often at effectively zero fees. ACH and SWIFT still measure settlement in days, with meaningfully higher costs. Even the newer instant payment systems being rolled out in traditional finance still carry clawback risk, which means settlement is not truly final. Lightning is. Once a payment clears, it is irreversible. For any business that has been burned by chargebacks or that needs real finality for global payments, that difference is not a nice-to-have. It is the entire point.

Running Lightning infrastructure can be complex, from node management to channel operations. How does Voltage simplify this for enterprise clients while maintaining security and control?

We abstract the infrastructure entirely. Node management, channel operations, liquidity balancing, monitoring, upgrades, all of it sits on our side. What the client sees is a clean API for sending and receiving payments. That is a deliberate design choice. Most enterprises do not want to become Lightning experts, and they should not have to be, any more than a company accepting card payments needs to run its own card network. We take on the operational complexity so their engineering team can focus on the product they are actually trying to ship, while still getting the security and control guarantees they need.

We are seeing increasing transaction volumes and more serious use cases on Lightning. What does this say about the maturity of the network today?

It tells you the network has crossed a real threshold. The volumes we see across our platform, and across the broader Lightning Network, are substantial and still growing. More importantly, the use cases behind those volumes are serious now. These are not hobbyist transactions. They are real businesses moving real money for real customers. That is how you know a network has matured. And from where I sit, Lightning is going to keep getting more robust from here, not less.

Open source has played a major role in Bitcoin and Lightning development. How does Voltage balance contributing to open source with building a commercial platform?

Open source is core to what we do. We build on top of open source Lightning implementations, and we have contributed back with our own open source projects along the way. That is not a marketing posture. It is how Bitcoin itself works, and we think it is the right way to build infrastructure that the rest of the industry is going to rely on. Our commercial product sits on top of that foundation, not in place of it. The goal is to make the open ecosystem stronger while building a business that gives enterprises a reliable, supported way to use it.

Looking ahead, what new use cases do you expect to emerge as Lightning becomes more integrated into financial infrastructure, especially in areas like gaming and machine-to-machine payments?

The use case surface is still wide open. Because Lightning is so fast and so cheap, it enables patterns that simply do not work on other networks. The one I am most excited about is AI agents and machine-to-machine payments. When autonomous agents start transacting with each other at scale, they need a rail that can handle high-frequency, low-value, instantly final payments. Lightning is essentially the only network built for that. Beyond that, standards like L402 are going to unlock a whole new model for metered access to APIs and content on the web. Gaming, AI, and programmable payments are the areas I would watch most closely over the next few years.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Voltage.