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¦
A Technical Overview of Virtual PSBTs in the Taproot Assets Protocol
The latest Taproot Assets Protocol release unlocks the full potential of the bitcoin scripting language for Taproot Assets, enabling developers to build popular constructions like multi-signature wallets and hash time lock contracts (HTLCs) for these new off-chain assets. To simplify the creation and transfer of assets that leverage these custom locking scripts, this release introduced the concept of virtual Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (vPSBTs). This post will explain what virtual andā¦
Mint the Future with Taproot Assets v0.2 šæš®
Today we're excited to announce the latest release of the Taproot Assets Protocol daemon (formerly Taro). Taproot Assets v0.2 provides the core set of features for developers looking to issue, send, receive, and discover assets on the bitcoin blockchain, currently on testnet with mainnet support coming soon. We first released the Taproot Assets draft specification a year ago, and continue to be grateful for the reception from the amazing bitcoin developer community. Bitcoin developers, weā¦
Welcome to the New litd: Your All-In-One Suite for LND Now Has Automation and Accounts! š¤ š
Today, we're excited to unveil a new set of features in the latest litd release including automated fee management, custodial accounts, finer grained LNC permissions, and the Pool Order Board, all designed based on feedback from the developer and node operator community. Litd bundles the base version of our lnd Lightning implementation with liquidity services such as Loop and Pool, a web-based node management UI with Terminal, the ability to remotely connect nodes with Lightning Node Connectā¦
A Technical Overview of Taproot Outputs and MuSig2
Overview This post will cover some basics around Taproot outputs and how to spend them via either the key or script paths. It will also cover the MuSig2 flow between two signing parties. Note that I wonāt go into extreme detail for either of these topics. Instead, this post is aimed at refreshing your memory on these topics or giving you enough of an understanding of how Taproot outputs and MuSig2 work so that the follow-up articles are more easily digestible. There are better articles out thereā¦
Announcing LND 0.16 beta: Smarter, Leaner, Faster
We're excited to announce LND 0.16.0 beta, our first release of 2023. Continuing on the path to improve all things Lightning from pure technological changes to developer experience, this latest release includes: Revamped pathfinding logic designed to improve payment success probability Watchtower updates engineered to save significant disk space, improve performance, and address several bugs Infrastructure update to include SQLite backend as a database option for new nodes Multiple refinementsā¦