Taproot Assets on Lightning: The Global Financial Interoperability Layer ⚡💱
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 payments…
Announcing LND 0.18 beta: Smarter Sweeps, Inbound Fees, and Improved Scaling! 🧹 📥📈
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 for…
Blazing the Trails: Improving LND Pathfinding Reliability 🛤️
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 distribution…
Clearing the Paths: A Deep Dive into LND's Pathfinding Mechanism 🛣️ 🌐
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 discuss…
Taproot Assets on Mainnet: A New Era for Bitcoin and Beyond 🌅
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 release…
Announcing LND 0.17 beta: Tapping into Taproot 🥕⚡
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. Reduced…
AI for All: Powering APIs and Large Language Models with Lightning ⚡🤖
Today, we’re 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 advanced…
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 channel’s 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 for…
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 and…
Mint the Future with Taproot Assets v0.2 🌿🔮
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, we…