Viareggio hosted the main annual event dedicated to the development of the Lightning Network and organized by Fulgur Ventures: the highlights.
Between April 2nd and 4th, the city of Viareggio hosted the Tuscany Lightning Summit, an event organized by Fulgur Ventures dedicated to the development and improvement of the Lightning Network.
The event brought together developers and Lightning companies who work daily to innovate and enhance the features of Bitcoin’s layer-2. Among the most well-known names in the industry were Giacomo Zucco, Peter Todd, Roy Sheinfeld, Steve Lee, John Carvalho, Matt Corallo, and Christian Decker.
The status of the BOLT 12 specification and the presentation of the decentralized exchange KaleidoSwap were among the most interesting technological developments discussed during the summit.
BOLT 12 ready for implementation
During the panel “BOLT 12 makes Bitcoin cash,” Steve Lee, Lead at Spiral, highlighted the main issues of Bitcoin’s layer-2 and introduced BOLT 12 (Basis of Lightning Technology 12) as a solution to some of the current challenges of the network.
Basis of Lightning Technology (BOLT) are technical specifications that outline the consensus rules and standards of the Lightning Network protocol.
BOLT 12 is a specification of the Lightning Network proposed by Blockstream developer Rusty Russell.
The current standard for receiving Lightning payments, BOLT 11, is optimized for some specific use cases but still has some critical issues: non-reusable invoices, no privacy for the payment recipient, need for interaction between the sender and recipient of the transaction, lack of support for the use of human-readable addresses such as Lightning Address.
Moreover, paying the same BOLT 11 invoice multiple times is risky because it can result in the loss of funds. Finally, BOLT 11 invoices can only be used to receive payments and not to send them.
Today, the main alternative to BOLT 11 is the LNURL payment protocol: during his speech, Steve Lee wanted to emphasize how LNURL does not present the censorship resistance, privacy, and security properties of Bitcoin on-chain.
Being a non-native protocol of the Lightning Network, the main problem with LNURL lies in the need for a web server, which is essential for creating new invoices and continuing to receive LN payments.
BOLT 12 resolves LNURL issues and enables:
- Reuse of invoices (referred to as “offers”) thanks to static QR codes, which can also be used to send funds;
- Not revealing the recipient node’s receiving address thanks to blinded paths;
- Creation of human-readable addresses without the use of a web server, TLS certificate, or Domain Name System.
In essence, the BOLT 12 proposal provides all the advantages of LNURL while preserving the censorship resistance, privacy, and security characteristics of Bitcoin natively on the Lightning Network.
In conclusion of his speech, Steve Lee reminded that Lightning Network must adhere to the properties of cash to align with the principles of censorship resistance, privacy, and security of Bitcoin’s layer 1. He then invited major wallets and Lightning implementations to initially integrate BOLT 12 for receiving payments and subsequently for sending them.
KaleidoSwap: the RGB exchange
During the panel “Trading assets on RGB“, Gabriele Sabbatini and Walter Maffione presented a demo of KaleidoSwap, a decentralized exchange that allows swaps between Bitcoin and assets on RGB, or directly between two RGB assets.
KaleidoSwap leverages the security of the Bitcoin protocol, the scalability of the Lightning Network, and the programmability of RGB to enable users to exchange assets in a trustless manner.
KaleidoSwap’s code is written in the Rust programming language and will be open-sourced after the official launch of the alpha version of the exchange.
During the two days of the summit, discussions also revolved around the future of Lightning wallets, the development of Taproot assets on Lightning, integrating Lightning Network into an external app through the Breez SDK library, and incentivizing merchants to accept bitcoin payments.
Closing the two days of the conference was a speech by Peter Todd, who compared the characteristics of different Bitcoin layer-2 solutions.
