Entering the Bitcoin Renaissance: Making Bitcoin and Lightning Multi-Asset Networks 🌅💡

Welcome to the latest edition of the Lightning Lab 🧪, a newsletter filled with Lightning Network updates, community coverage, and, of course, memes! With bitcoin dominance hitting a 2.5 year high of 54%, an ETF approval on the horizon, and a host of ecosystem launches and updates to cover, the community’s excitement about the future is palpable. We’re expanding the pie and bringing bitcoin to billions — the time to jump in and help is now!

Making Bitcoin and Lightning Multi-Asset Networks 💱

Last week, we released the first mainnet alpha of Taproot Assets, a scalable protocol for developers to issue assets on the bitcoin blockchain and send them over the Lightning Network for instant, high volume, low fee transactions. This initial mainnet release supports on-chain functionality, with Lightning support coming 🔜. The reception to the mainnet announcement blew us away, with outlets like Bitcoin Magazine, Coindesk, The Block, Decrypt, and Blockworks providing coverage.

The global bitcoin community was particularly excited about the release, with posts about it in languages such as Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, Italian, and Finnish. And people are using it! The developer community has already minted over 41,000 distinct asset types on mainnet, which resulted in issuing a very large number of individual assets over the last week as each mint can create multiple assets. And this was all without congesting the blockchain.

Today, stablecoin issuers hold more US Treasuries than major economies like Germany, and as such the opportunity for onboarding assets to bitcoin is clearly enormous. With this release, we are one step closer to bitcoinizing the dollar and the world’s financial assets, which will bring significantly more users to bitcoin and Lightning.

As Lightning Labs CEO and Co-Founder Elizabeth Stark told The Block, “a major narrative of the next cycle will be the bitcoin renaissance, and it has already begun in full swing. Developers are building on bitcoin and Lightning around the world, and making Lightning a multi-asset network will cement bitcoin's place as the internet of money.” Over the weekend, she spoke about multi-asset Lightning, AI use cases, and the next frontiers of Lightning at the Plan ₿ conference hosted by Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, the Tether team, and the city of Lugano’s Plan ₿. Attendees were very excited about the Taproot Assets release to say the least. 😎

Capitalizing on the momentum from the past week, Lightning Labs Head of Business Development Ryan Gentry discussed bitcoinizing the dollar, disrupting incumbents, and what opportunities Taproot Assets presents for new startups on Bitcoin Fundamentals with well-known podcaster Preston Pysh. Read on for how the Taproot Assets launch is leading us into the Bitcoin Renaissance…

News & Updates

Lightning Launches

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that they will be integrating the Lightning Network to enable faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. We’re excited for more users to get access to the instant settlement, global reach, and low fees of Lightning!

Premise, a data and analytics platform powered by a global network of on-the-ground contributors, announced a partnership with Neutronpay, which will allow their global users to easily convert and transfer their earnings in Bitcoin through the Lightning Network.

GPUtopia is a new marketplace for decentralized GPU compute and related AI services. Users connect their GPUs to the platform to perform jobs for buyers and get paid in bitcoin through the Lightning Network. They have 4 BTC in bounties for any developers willing to help build their open-source platform.

Lightspark unveiled an enterprise-grade solution for global remittances called Universal Money Addresses (UMA). UMA is based on the Lightning Address/LNURL protocol, initially developed by Zebedee CTO Andre Neves and nostr creator fiatjaf, and will help facilitate the onboarding of traditional financial institutions to the Lightning Network. Launch partners include Bakkt, Bitnob, Coins.ph, Ripio, Foxbit, Xapo Bank, and Zero Hash. 

Mash released Mash 2.0, a new suite of publishers and creator monetization tools and partnered with Marty Bent on a relaunch of the TFTC website into a top curated content experience.

Tiramisu Wallet is a new wallet for the Taproot Assets protocol that just went live on mainnet, following the latest tapd v0.3 mainnet alpha release.

Lightning Stats

• 📈 River Research released a 45-page report on the state of the Lightning Network, where they measured that Lightning grew at least 1212% over the last two years, with even more growth coming from direct or private channel usage that was not measured. 

• 💹 LN Markets is setting their third consecutive all-time high in monthly trading volume, with more than $60M traded midway through October. They also just reached $1B in cumulative trading volume since inception, congratulations!

• 🇱🇻 Baltic Honeybadger enabled 20 merchants at the conference to accept bitcoin using the Bitcoinize POS machines with a BTCPay Server instance. Attendees spent 1.1 BTC (~€27,078 at the time of the conference) across 2,944 transactions throughout the conference.

• 🐝 Alby users made over 1,019,040 Lightning payments in August, an All-Time High and Alby’s first month with over 1M Lightning payments. 

• 🚣 River hit 3M Lightning transactions routed through their nodes, and September was another all-time monthly high.

• 🌊 Geyser projects received 4,669 donations from 2,000+ contributors in August, catalyzed by Geyser’s new nostr zapping integration.

Lightning Ecosystem

• 📖 Lyn Alden, the highly regarded investment strategist, published Broken Money, a book about the past, present, and future of money that points to bitcoin and Lightning as the solution to the broken monetary system.

• ⛈️ Zeus released the new version of their app with embedded LND node, Olympus LSP, and self-custodial, trust-minimized Lightning Addresses. They’re also adding the ability to request zero-conf Simple Taproot Channels from their LSP.

• 🔌 Voltage released Doppler, a domain-specific language for Lightning Network, explicitly tailored for testing Lightning apps. They also published a series of articles exploring how AI companies and projects can harness the power of the Lightning Network to push innovation and what tools builders can use to build this future.

• 🔎 Nostr Assets launched their testnet site that allows users to send, receive, or trade bitcoin and Taproot Assets using their nostr accounts. They recently shared some highlights of their development progress, including a NodeJS version of the Taproot Assets API library and a brand-new UI that allows developers to manage commands for the Taproot Assets software.

• 🧠 PlebAI is an open-source collection of language models that operate on the nostr protocol with an integrated Lightning wallet. They just released their TypeScript SDK for other developers to integrate their agents into their projects and websites.

• 👻 Spirit of Satoshi is a new bitcoin-focused Large Language Model (LLM) trained on the global corpus of bitcoin and bitcoin-related content. They are curating that content using a Lightning-powered tool for “reinforcement learning from human feedback” (RLHF) that pays sats for community contributions.

• ✉ CoverLetterGPT is an open-source app for AI-generated cover letters, which now accepts Lightning Network payments.

• 🤖 Brian Astrove wrote a blog post on the the intersection of AI agents and Lightning payments, focused on L402 and how it can be used for payments between agents.

• 🏆 Bolt.Fun is hosting another Legends of Lightning tournament in partnership with Fulgur Ventures. The online hackathon started on October 5th and ends on December 17th. They already have more than 180 makers and 44 projects competing for 2.5 BTC in prizes.

• 🛠️ Btrust Builders, known as Qala before the Btrust acquisition, announced that the Build for Africa Bitcoin/LN hackathon has 140 registrations and 37 projects.

• 🐻‍❄️ Lightning Polar released v2.1.0 which includes tapd 0.3 support. This is the easiest way for developers to start playing with Taproot Assets!

• 🏞 River launched Lightning Vouchers, enabling users to display QR codes to enable Bitcoin ATM withdrawals, host giveaways, provide rewards, and distribute cashback to users. They also integrated LNURL support to their River Lightning Services infrastructure.

• 💧 Amboss launched Hydro, a liquidity automation service for Magma that will automatically manage the size of your capacity and inbound liquidity.

• 🪽 Lamassu, the bitcoin ATM company, announced they're integrating Lightning cash-in and cash-out support in their next release, using Galoy’s infrastructure.

• 📅 Cal.com, an open-source meeting scheduling platform, now allows users to collect Lightning payments through an integration with Alby.

• 👖Pocket Bitcoin, a Lightning top-up service, is officially live. Users can send CHF/EUR and instantly receive funds in their Lightning wallets.

• 🎮 ZEBEDEE partnered with AdInMo, enabling gamers to get bitcoin rewards for viewing in-game display and video ads in mobile games. They also released a Hackathon Course that targets developers with no Bitcoin or LN experience.

• 🌍 Neutronpay has a new logo and added 7 more countries (Malaysia, Thailand, Benin, Senegal, Togo, Cote d’Ivoire, Rwanda) to the SendCash feature on their app, allowing their users to send global remittances using the Lightning Network.

• 💡 Lightspark has landed on Replit! Developers can now use Replit’s web-based developer environment to experience the core functionality of the Lightspark Wallet SDK.

• 🐝 Alby introduced the Alby Developer Portal, gathering all the tools the Alby team built to make building on Lightning easier.  They also wrote about the “Value Time Split” innovation in Podcasting 2.0, which allows podcasters to split their streaming earnings with artists while the artist’s song is played on the podcast.

• 💽 Coinkite’s newest bitcoin product, Satslink, is a versatile hardware device that empowers developers to explore a wide range of communications and mobile hardware applications, including serving as a Lightning wallet and nostr client.

• 🐯 TaskTiger is a new nostr client built on the Data Vending Machines (DVM) Nostr Improvement Proposal (NIP) that allows users to pay AI agents for task completion over Lightning. This team previously won the AI4All hackathon with their Photobolt project.

• 💾 Vendata.io is another nostr client built to interact with DVMs, created the NIP writer himself, pablof7z. It’s a free market of data-processing AIs powered by Lightning micropayments.  

• 💼 OpenNode announced a partnership with Anedot, an online fundraising platform. The platform will now allow political campaigns, non-profit organizations, churches, ministries, and schools to easily accept Bitcoin donations over Lightning.

• 🌎 Ibex partnered with Swan for instant fiat conversions in the USA, and partnered with Bakkt for their expansion into Latin America.

• 🎳 Strike integrated with Bitrefill to enable users globally to make real-world purchases via the Lightning Network within their app.

• 🇬🇧 CoinCorner teamed up with Lolly, a Point of Sale (PoS) and payments specialist from the UK, to bring Bitcoin and Lightning functionality to all their PoS devices, enabling hospitality providers to take Bitcoin for food and drinks.

• 🇯🇵 Nayuta open sourced their mobile Lightning wallet with an embedded LND node, and their code for a dedicated Lightning Service Provider.

• 🔐 Zaplocker.com is a self-custodial trust minimized Lightning Address server using nostr and Hodl invoices.

• 🌴 LNFlash, an open-source bitcoin on-ramp for the Caribbean islands, published 5 bounties on Stakwork for developers willing to help them integrate a chat-based nostr client.

• 🔦 FlashSats is a new LSP dedicated to selling channels from the entity behind the 1sat.com node. They charge a 2% APY along with a nominal opening fee.

• ⛲ Fountain, the Lightning-powered podcasting experience, released support for BOLT-11 invoices on the web so you can Boost from your browser without a Fountain account.

• 🎥 PeerTube now has a plugin that allows creators to receive donations through the Lightning Network. 

• 🖥️ SimLN is a new tool for simulating active Lightning Networks in any test environment (regtest or signet, local or cloud) that helps developers mimic realistic payment activity, which can be helpful to test protocol changes, perform load-testing on an app or a website, or more generally any LN-related research project.

• 💲 Zaprite released their Payment Links product, that allows users to create individual products or services and generate unique URLs to embed and share.

• 🤳 Wavlake announced an upcoming iOS app for their Lightning-powered streaming music experience. Recently, the application introduced Artists Splits, allowing artists to include up to four Wavlake users in the payment split for their tracks, sharing revenue with their producers and other collaborators.

• 🔧 LNbits released a Node Manager that allows users to manage Lightning peers and channels without leaving LNbits.

• 💫 Joltz released a bitcoin rewards spinner for Shopify and WooCommerce merchants.

• 🃏 THNDR Games announced the duel mode for Solitaire. Friends can play head-to-head against each other with sats on the line.

• 🏖️ Praia Bitcoin donated 50 Bitcoinize POS machines to be distributed to the bitcoin communities worldwide that applied for Geyser grants.

• 💦 Geyser announced the winners of the 5th Geyser Grant for Education in Bitcoin Communities.

• 👩🏿‍🎓Maureen Ononiwu wrote a blog post detailing her efforts to optimize the neutrino sync process during her ‘Summer of Bitcoin’ internship. This process is how mobile LND users verify the blockchain upon startup.

• 🕹️ Super Mario Sats did their online world premier with Lightning Plays Mario, inspired by Twitch Plays Pokémon. Users watching the stream can send sats to a Lightning Address with their move in the memo field, and collectively they’d try to beat the game.

Entering the Bitcoin Renaissance 💡

As Lightning Labs CEO and co-founder Elizabeth Stark told The Block, “a major narrative of the next cycle will be the bitcoin renaissance, and it has already begun in full swing.” To us, the “bitcoin renaissance” means an explosion of new ideas, new use cases, and new applications leveraging the bitcoin and Lightning networks. The time is ripe for this renaissance as the world is turning its attention back to bitcoin with ETF approval on the horizon, the 2024 halving less than six months away, and bitcoin outperforming all other traditional asset classes in 2023.

We are already starting to see the beginnings of such an explosion of new ideas today. For one, there seems to be a growing consensus that bitcoin will be the currency of AI, including from Arthur Hayes and Lyn Alden. New developers are showing up in droves to build creative new projects like GPUtopia bridging the AI and Lightning developer communities, Nostr Assets making it easy for nostr developers to mint and trade Taproot Assets, and Deezy and Ordimint integrating Lightning payments to provide a better user experience for inscriptions artists. The research community has also received a boost of energy and creativity from new people working on projects like the numerous covenant proposals for improving bitcoin’s smart contract capabilities, BitVM for introducing arbitrary computation in a scalable manner, and ZeroSync for bringing zero-knowledge proofs for further scalability improvements. And while this renaissance is beginning, bitcoin dominance, measuring bitcoin’s percentage of total market capitalization for the crypto industry, just hit a 2.5 year high of 54%.

The reason why this next cycle will be focused on bitcoin is because of all the behind the scenes building from the developer community over the last several years. They have chosen to build scalable protocols like Lightning and Taproot Assets on the most secure and decentralized blockchain, instead of cutting corners and choosing centralized or unscalable platforms. They have done the hard work to improve the tooling and infrastructure to be as developer-friendly as possible. They have iterated with their early adopters to make the wallets user-friendly. They are ready to bring this technology to the world, and ready to support new ideas from new entrants that will broaden the pie for all. 

With the next halving coming up, and all of this positive momentum building, we know the future of bitcoin is bright, and we expect this renaissance of new people building new ideas to explode. We know that bitcoin and Lightning’s foundations have been laid with pain-staking care over the last several years. We know that the community is fully prepared to onboard a surge of new users and new developers from all over the globe. Join us! 🧙

Lightning Labs News

Product

Last week, as highlighted above, we released the mainnet alpha of the Taproot Assets daemon, enabling developers to mint, send, receive, and explore assets on the bitcoin blockchain. Our next focus for Taproot Assets will be building Lightning functionality with Taproot Asset channels. As a first step, we released LND 0.17, which included Simple Taproot Channels enabling users to open unannounced channels with Taproot transactions improving on-chain privacy and cost efficiency. Enabling Taproot Channels is a prerequisite before we can unlock Taproot Assets Channels on Lightning. We are hard at work to get this out! 

For Lightning Terminal, the node and liquidity management dashboard, we released on-chain send and receive functionality. Further, for logged-in node operators, we released peer cards on the Explore rankings list to indicate what nodes a node operator is peered with and, on click through, more details about a node operator’s routing history with that peer. Those details could include open channels, number of forwards, volume of forwards, and earnings from that peer. 

Media

• CEO Elizabeth Stark spoke about multi-asset Lightning, AI use cases, and the importance of usability with Aaron Van Wirdum at the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano, Switzerland.

• CTO Laolu Osuntokun explained why bitcoin is the currency for AI on a podcast hosted by Ark Invest, accompanied by Cathie Wood, Paul Itoi, Kody Low, and others.

• Head of Business Development Ryan Gentry discussed Taproot Assets and the growth of the Lightning Network with Preston Pysh on The Investor’s Podcast. He also spoke about “AI Infinity, Bitcoin Scarcity” on a panel with Aleks Svetski and Jon Gordon for the Austin Bitcoin Club, and presented on the next frontiers of Lightning during the Bitcoin Olympics hackathon hosted by the BTC Startup Lab.

• Protocol Engineer Jonathan Harvey-Buschel covered the technical foundations of the Taproot Assets protocol in a presentation at the Hackers Congress at Paralelni Polis.

• Senior Lightning Infrastructure Engineer Oliver Gugger held a workshop on the latest spec discussions regarding the future of the Lightning Network at Surfin’ Bitcoin with updates on the latest spec discussion around the future of the Lightning Network. At the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano, he talked about making Bitcoin and Lightning multi-asset networks with Taproot Assets.

• Developer Advocate Hannah Rosenberg gave an overview of the Lightning Network Architecture Design for the Legends of Lightning tournament. She also taught developers how to run LND and Taproot Assets at The Atlanta Bitcoin Conference (TABConf), and presented on building Lightning applications for the Bitcoin Olympics hackathon by the BTC Startup Lab.

Hiring

Are you an engineer with security experience and a passion for bitcoin? We are hiring for a Security Engineer!

Other roles include: 

Lightning Infrastructure Engineer, Senior Engineering Manager, Cryptographic Protocol Engineer

Join us in making magic internet money a reality! 🧙‍♂️

Want to get involved? Join the LND Developer Community on Slack.

Meams