How MuSig2 Is Powering Lightning Liquidity with Loop šš
In this post, we'll explain how we used MuSig2, a protocol for aggregating public keys for the Schnorr digital signature algorithm, to enhance Lightning Loop, our non-custodial submarine swap service between on-chain bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Submarine swaps enable users to swap on-chain Bitcoin for off-chain Lightning Network Bitcoin (and vice versa) using hash time-locked contracts (HTLCs), ensuring atomicity and eliminating counterparty risk. We are also excited to share a recentā¦
A New Era for Stablecoins: Tether Is Coming to Bitcoin and Lightning ā”šø
Today we are excited to announce that Tether is bringing USDT to bitcoin, with both on-chain transactions and Lightning Network support. This announcement will enable Tether to tap into the security and decentralization of the bitcoin blockchain together with the speed and scalability of Lightning, bringing the world's most popular stablecoin to bitcoin. Powered by the Taproot Assets protocol developed by Lightning Labs with contributions from the open source community, this integration makesā¦
Taproot Assets on Lightning: The Global Financial Interoperability Layer ā”š±
Today we're excited to announce the release of Taproot Assets on Lightning, the first multi-asset Lightning protocol on mainnet. With this release, assets can be minted on bitcoin and sent via the Lightning Network instantly for low fees. As such, we now have the ability to make bitcoin and Lightning multi-asset networks in a scalable manner anchored in bitcoin's security and decentralization. This step forward will give users access to the world's currencies on an open, interoperable paymentsā¦
Announcing LND 0.18 beta: Smarter Sweeps, Inbound Fees, and Improved Scaling! š§¹ š„š
We are excited to announce the release of LND 0.18 beta! This version is brimming with improvements spanning multiple functional areas. Some of the release highlights include: Improved UTXO Sweeping process, to ensure timely confirmations in highly variable on-chain fee environments. This is achieved by incorporating a deadline-aware sweeping methodology which provides users with increased control over the urgency of transactions and the fees they are willing to pay. SQL Schema store forā¦
Blazing the Trails: Improving LND Pathfinding Reliability š¤ļø
In Part 1 of the pathfinding blog post series we saw that with empirical engineering one can already design a reasonable and transparent probability estimator essential for improving payment success. However, it has limitations regarding predictability and is not very flexible. Thus, we introduced an alternative estimator that employs a more rigorous mathematical approach to estimate probabilities. This method, formalized in a seminal publication is based on an assumed liquidity distributionā¦
Clearing the Paths: A Deep Dive into LND's Pathfinding Mechanism š£ļø š
The Lightning Network holds the promise of enabling nearly instantaneous settlements for Bitcoin payments. However, achieving this goal in a sovereign way presents substantial technical challenges, primarily due to the opacity of channel balances, which is inherent to the design of the network. In this blog post, we will delve into the workings of pathfinding (or payment planning in a wider sense) within the Lightning Network, with a specific focus on its implementation in LND. We discussā¦
Taproot Assets on Mainnet: A New Era for Bitcoin and Beyond š
Today we're excited to release the mainnet alpha of the Taproot Assets daemon, providing a feature-complete developer experience for issuing, managing, and exploring stablecoins or other assets on the bitcoin blockchain. This release also begins forward compatibility, which means the protocol will not have any more breaking changes that would affect assets issued on mainnet. This mainnet release of the protocol supports on-chain functionality, with Lightning support coming soon. This releaseā¦
Announcing LND 0.17 beta: Tapping into Taproot š„ā”
We're excited to announce the release of LND 0.17.0 beta! In this release, we've upgraded LND with Simple Taproot Channels, enabling improved privacy and cost efficiency for Lightning users and developers. This change also lays the groundwork for future advancements like Taproot Assets on the Lightning Network. Highlights of the release include: Simple Taproot Channels, allowing users to open unannounced channels with Taproot transactions improving on-chain privacy and cost efficiency. Reducedā¦
AI for All: Powering APIs and Large Language Models with Lightning ā”š¤
Today, weāre excited to announce the release of a new set of developer tools to enable the Lightning and AI developer communities to build global, inclusive, and out-of-the-box cost effective LLM (Large Language Model) tooling which seamlessly incorporates Lightning and bitcoin. These tools are built on the L402 protocol, a Lightning native authentication mechanism, and Langchain, a popular library to simplify working with AI agents by adding external data to allow for more advancedā¦
A Technical Walkthrough of Hash Time Locked Contracts and Lightning Channel Operations
This post will walk through the different operations of a Lightning channel by following a long-running example with plenty of explanatory diagrams. First, we explore how Hash Time Locked Contracts (HTLCs) are added to a channel and how channel peers commit to a new state including these HTLCs. Next, we discuss how a channelās normal flow is re-established after a disconnection. And finally, we finish with how a cooperative channel closure happens. These topics are all covered in Bolt 2 forā¦