Not trying to start anything, but I'm pretty sure Litecoin beat even Bitcoin to the punch:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/blockstream-sends-first-litecoin-lightning-microtransaction I suspect there might be others.
Still, early implementation is good. And if you're able to build lightning support into weeee cash and make it easy to use and ultimately easy to swap across chains (the real killer feature of lightning) without relying on exchanges that could be very big. Lightning could also be the basis of non-financial transactions (related to games, messaging etc) without spamming up the blockchain.
Congrats and good luck
Wow, I didn't know features of lightning network could be so wide-reaching. Let's just hope these features are not released when this horrendous crypto dump fest is still ongoing, since nothing can move upwards these days.
If Einsteinium releases regular updates that could benefit us when the tide changes and new altcoin investors are looking for coins capable of surviving, that have dedicated and capable teams. If there is a good, regular history of updates when alts get another look, that might be more valuable than a super short term news pump of the kind lots of alts saw in november/december.
I suspect Lightning, still in its infancy, could be a good catalyst for development, not necessarily all to emc2 or lighting itself, but also to the wallet and infrastructure so the tech can actually be used and not have merely theoretical use cases. TBH, I'm not sure what smart contract features, if any, EMC2 has at the moment, but I think there are games and dapps in general that would do well on Einsteinium and help support the pro-science branding. Cryptokitties itself is a genetics game, and those can be quite fun and have an obvious tie-in to science. Some could even aid funding separately. If you remember, cryptokitties caused a lot of congestion on ETH, by using lightning off chain, we could reduce on chain game transaction traffic and avoid the same problems and keep unnecessary costs low for all.
I've also always thought that crypto could make a great crowdfunding platform, a la igg, kickstarter, gofundme, not just paid for with crypto, but set up with dapps. For our branding, I think it would be great if a crowdfund platform focused on scientists, universities et al to set up funding requests through a platform on the emc2 blockchain for specific studies. To boot, if we supported lightning and atomic swaps, that platform needn't require people to acquire EMC2, they could pay through a lightning channel in bitcoin and having it 'magically' come out and settle on the emc2 blockchain. It would enable far more people to participate and lower barriers to entry.
If lightning is just a scaling solution for EMC2, it doesn't seem very necessary. If it's added for atomic swaps, that's more useful if properly supported in the emc2 wallet, but it's not very on point for what emc2 is, it doesn't support the branding or answer the question of why have emc2. If, on the other hand, it's being built to enable infrastructure like smart contracts, it could be amazing. That could help construct 5 years of development roadmap along the lines of things discussed above that sort of naturally follow.