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…
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…
Welcome to the New litd: Your All-In-One Suite for LND Now Has Automation and Accounts! 🤖 🌐
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 Connect…
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 won’t 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 there…
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 refinements…
Hello Taro: Building the (Tap)Root of the World's Financial Network with Bitcoin 👋🍠
Today we're excited to announce the alpha release of the Taro daemon, enabling developers to mint, send, and receive assets on the bitcoin blockchain. In April, we first announced Taro, a Taproot-powered protocol for issuing assets that can be transferred over bitcoin and in the future, the Lightning Network for instant, high volume, low fee transactions. We are grateful to the bitcoin developer community for their valuable feedback, and have incorporated it into the draft Bitcoin Improvement…
Announcing lnd 0.15 beta: To Taproot and Beyond! ♾️
We're pleased to announce lnd 0.15 beta, our first release of 2022! Building on our commitment to make the Lightning Network more reliable, robust, and secure, our latest release includes: The ability to create and spend from Taproot addresses New RPC methods to support experimental MuSig2 signing Database space reduction of ~95% by reducing state stored in revocation logs for new data New pathfinding variable to give more control over time and cost tradeoff Mobile improvements including a…
Announcing Taro: A New Protocol for Multi-Asset Bitcoin and Lightning 🍠💱🌍
Today we’re excited to announce Taro, a new Taproot-powered protocol for issuing assets on the bitcoin blockchain that can be transferred over the Lightning Network for instant, high volume, low fee transactions. This announcement marks a big shift to a multi-asset Lightning Network with the potential for the world’s currencies to route through bitcoin liquidity on the network. At its core, Taro taps into the security and stability of the bitcoin network and the speed, scalability, and low fees…