The Lightning Network has lit a flame within the crypto community and now its fire has reached Iran with their Lightning Torch transaction relay using Bitcoin crossing the border this week.

The Lightning Torch event, which involves Bitcoin users passing around a transaction on the Lightning Network, adding funds and sending it forward, has been talked about greatly since its launch in January this year.

Twitter user, hodlonaut, conjured up the idea and now over 230 people have held the flame at one point, crossing borders. \

The move to Iran was not without controversy as the previous user had refused to send the money to the nation. Peach Inc. senior software engineer Vijay Boyapati had sighted political reasons for his reluctance to send the money to Iranian, Coinex executive Ziya Sadr.

Boyapati said this on the issue: “Very sad that two peaceful people cannot transact with each other across the world because of the state,”

The issue was resolved by a British user and the money was eventually given to Ziya. According to the project’s monitoring website, UK-based Bitgeiniog facilitated the move after receiving the payment from Bitcoin industry media resource Bitcoin Magazine. Since then Ziya has moved the torch on to another user in Iran and now according to reports, the Torch has now traveled to Israel in another move that is politically charged.

Iran has been at the center of Huawei and Canada scandal, with the companys chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou , currently awaiting trial amid tense political disagreements between China and the US/Canada after claims she allegedly made deals within the Arab nation going against economic sanctions imposed.

After a momentary blip, the good news has continued for the Lightning network. Statistics from monitoring resourcd 1ML.com confirm that overall capacity increased almost 20 percent in february, while the number of nodes and channels went up 19 and 39 percent respectively. The network was also used to power the first meme into space.