This is an Atlas21 summary of the history published on rgb.info, the reference resource. The full detailed version is at the link below.
Ten years of client-side validation, a fork in the roadmap, and a mainnet launch that split two competing visions.
RGB Protocol on Bitcoin has been in development for roughly ten years: a research project born in a Milan lab in 2015, built on Peter Todd‘s client-side validation idea, and slowly turned into a working asset layer that reached the Bitcoin mainnet in July 2025.
The Milan origins (2015-2017)
The story begins at the Blockchain Lab in Milan, founded by Giacomo Zucco. In 2015 the lab was asked to map all existing approaches to colored coins – the first attempts to issue assets on Bitcoin. The conclusion was to design something better, and the name RGB was proposed by Mir Serena Liponi. A year later, Peter Todd presented client-side validation at Scaling Bitcoin in Milan: the insight that Bitcoin need only anchor a cryptographic commitment, while validation can happen off-chain between the parties involved. That became the theoretical backbone of RGB, and in 2017 Zucco and Riccardo Casatta began turning it into a real protocol.
Lightning, funding, and a development fork (2018-2025)
In 2018 Giacomo Zucco proposed combining RGB with the Lightning Network, and Alekos Filini built the first working prototype. Funding came from Bitfinex, Bitrefill, and Fulgur Ventures; Maxim Orlovsky took on the lead developer role, and later Federico Tenga assembled a dedicated team at Bitfinex that produced rgb-lib, a widely adopted wallet library, and the RGB Lightning Node. By 2025 the community faced a fork in the road: continue with v0.11.1, the incremental path on which many products had already built, or adopt v0.12, a substantial rewrite introduced with little prior discussion. Builders chose v0.11.1.
Mainnet and beyond (2025-2026)
In July 2025 RGB Protocol on Bitcoin v0.11.1 reached mainnet, the RGB Protocol Association was founded, and several products – including Iris Wallet, Bitmask, and LNFI – went live. A month later Tether announced its intention to launch USDT on RGB, with chief executive Paolo Ardoino describing it as a new path for a stablecoin he called “truly native, lightweight, private, and scalable”. As of 2026, v0.11.1 is the only version in active development, maintained at github.com/rgb-protocol, with a roadmap focused on Lightning optimisation, USDT readiness, and new integrations including Ark.
This is a summary. The full history, with the complete timeline, all names, and technical details, has been published by the RGB Protocol team on their reference resource. Read the original article on rgb.info.
