Detailed Taproot Assets mainnet alpha version, Bitcoin network ushered in a new era?

Written by Ryan Gentry, Lightning Labs

Compiled by Felix, PANews

Bitcoin Layer2 infrastructure company Lightning Labs released an alpha version of its Taproot Assets mainnet on the evening of October 18, providing a fully functional development experience for issuing, managing, and exploring stablecoins or other assets on the Bitcoin blockchain. This version is also starting to be forward-compatible, meaning that there won’t be any major changes to the protocol that affect assets published on mainnet. The mainnet version of the protocol supports on-chain functionality and will soon support the Lightning Network.

Lightning Labs said the launch marks the dawn of a new era for Bitcoin. With Taproot Assets v0.3, builders have all the tools they need to make Bitcoin a multi-asset network while maintaining Bitcoin’s core values in a scalable manner. These new Taproot Assets Lightning transactions will be routed through existing Bitcoin liquidity at the core of the network, allowing routing nodes to unknowingly forward Taproot Assets transactions on the Lightning Network, extending Bitcoin’s global network effects and strengthening the blockchain’s secure foundation.

Early adopters have iterated with the Lightning Labs team over the past few months of testnet development, minting nearly 2,000 assets on the testnet and synchronizing their nodes with the Universe server, a repository containing all the information needed to initialize and download the state of a particular Taproot Assets, more than 420,000 times.

Taproot Assets Daemon is available in the latest Polar release, a common prototyping rapid design tool for developers, and in litd v0.12, Lightning Labs’ toolkit includes lnd for node operations, liquidity management tool Loop and Pool, accounting tool Faraday, and tapd for multi-asset support. To get started with Taproot Assets Daemon: Read the installation section, download the Daemon version, view the API documentation, and read the Getting Started Guide. Note that while mainnet is supported in this release, the label of alpha indicates that you want the community to test for potential bugs. For a detailed explanation of how Taproot Assets works, dive into BIPs and documentation.

Bitcoinization of the US dollar and the world’s financial assets

! [Detailed Taproot Assets mainnet alpha version, Bitcoin network ushered in a new era?] ](https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-69a80767fe-e0b2682055-dd1a6f-69ad2a.webp)

Chart from The Block, Hard Yaka

Against the backdrop of El Salvador’s legalization of Bitcoin in 2021, the Lightning Network community experienced explosive growth, especially in emerging markets. Users around the world are enjoying instant settlement, low-fee, peer-to-peer Bitcoin transactions without the need for financial intermediaries. Lightning Labs continues to receive requests from developers to provide them with tools to add stablecoins to their applications. The demand for stablecoins from users is huge. Stablecoin issuers hold more U.S. Treasuries than major developed countries such as Germany and South Korea, demonstrating the importance of stablecoins worldwide.

As Blockworks reported last week, this demand exists because stablecoins are “a better product in emerging economies than fiat currencies.” Stablecoins offer a better user experience in terms of accessibility, custody, and utility. In addition, more than 2 billion people live under double- or triple-digit inflation, which makes stablecoins more attractive relative to the US dollar in terms of price stability.

In addition, developers have been experimenting with real-world assets such as gold, U.S. Treasuries, and programmatic coupon-paid corporate bonds. Bitcoin’s global liquidity, decentralization, and security provide the best platform to bring these experiments to the mass market.

Users of stablecoins, especially in emerging markets, are quite pragmatic and just want the fastest settlement time and the lowest fees. It turns out that the Lightning Network is designed to provide this experience on top of Bitcoin’s security and decentralization. With Taproot Assets, bring global user demand back to Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. With stablecoins integrated into the Lightning wallet, users will be able to stack Sats at minimal cost as circumstances allow.

Built on mainnet via Taproot Assets v0.3

For developers looking to participate in the build, version 0.3 of the Taproot Assets protocol provides a complete set of tools to start publishing, managing, and exploring mainnet assets on-chain.

**Full Functional Distribution and Redemption **API

First, the Asset Issuance API has been improved based on developer feedback. Branch banking, that is, minting multiple sets of assets at different times to maintain fungibility. Issuers will sign newly issued assets using group_key, allowing users to automatically verify that newly issued assets are replaceable with older issued assets. In addition, Taproot Assets v0.3 includes a new asset burning API to facilitate asset issuer redemption. By using this burn feature, assets in the supply can be provably destroyed, and issuers can safely release the real-world assets they represent on-chain. By uploading proof of these destroyed transactions to the public chain, issuers can automatically communicate this action to the public, ensuring that users have the latest asset information.

Asynchronous Receive Function

For on-chain Taproot Assets transactions, users need to send and receive assets if both parties are not online at the same time. For the receiver, this means being able to generate an address that anyone can send to at any time. Taproot Assets v0.3 does this by providing developers with tools to add Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to on-chain addresses. The recipient’s wallet will then sync with a specific Universe server detailed by that URI in order to download the off-chain proof data they need to send the newly received asset in the future. This feature is processed in the background to guarantee a seamless experience with asynchronous reception.

Universes**

Universes are repositories that hold all the information needed for the Taproot Asset wallet to initialize and synchronize the state of a particular Taproot Asset. Multiple Universe servers can operate as a collection, and all servers are kept in sync for a given asset, so even if the publisher’s server is offline, the receiver can verify that the sender’s asset is legitimate through many different data sources.

A key feature of Taproot Assets v0.3 is the introduction of Multiverse. The Multiverse mode allows a given Universe server to support multiple assets and contain all relevant history for each asset. This pattern allows developers to acquire and host all the data they need to build a block explorer for users.

Improvements to scalability, security, and developer experience

Finally, the mainnet alpha version of Taproot Assets, where Taproot Assets was developed, received significant improvements in security, scalability, and developer experience.

In terms of scalability, the new version includes a build-loadtest command that allows developers to stress test the software themselves. Lightning Labs has used it extensively internally to verify that software is ready for mainnet deployment, and is now making it available to developers to perform their own validation. To support DevOps teams in ensuring that their infrastructure is handling Daemon’s load, the ability to report metrics to Prometheus (monitoring systems and time series databases) is also provided, so developers can better visualize the performance of their software.

In terms of security, Taproot Assets v0.3 adds more secure proofs, including block height and header validation, restrictions on proof decoding to prevent resource exhaustion, reorganization security in the event of a Bitcoin mainnet blockchain fork, and many other lower-level updates See the release notes for details.

An important milestone was the addition of protocol versioning to all upgradeable parts of the protocol. This provides developers with the forward compatibility guarantees they need to publish assets on mainnet. In addition, test vectors were generated for Bitcoin Improvement Suggestions (BIPs), enabling developers to verify the integrity of the protocol by reimplementing it themselves. Finally, this release includes a number of command-line improvements based on extensive feedback to provide the smoothest development experience.

** Towards ****Multi-Asset **Lightning Network

With this release, Lightning Labs’ focus will shift to Taproot Assets’ ultimate goal: making the Lightning Network a multi-asset network. Specifically, it is to provide users with stablecoin support in a borderless financial world. Once the payment channel function of the protocol is completed, users will be able to send and receive the currency of their choice through the Lightning Network. Leveraging distributed liquidity networks to serve global markets will be a major shift in the way global flows operate. Asset issuers and users are able to leverage the existing network effects of the Lightning Network, from Bitcoin liquidity to routing node markets to integrating a broad ecosystem of wallets, exchanges, merchants, and more, without having to start from scratch.

Before starting development, two main features were needed: incorporating payment channel functionality into the Taproot Assets protocol and building the multi-asset Lightning Network. Both channels have been delivered: the unannounced Taproot channel is now running in production environments with lndv0.17, and a draft specification for the Taproot Assets protocol channel has been published as a Bitcoin Lightning Improvement Proposal (bLIP). With the completion of this work, and the release of the mainnet alpha version of Taproot Assets Daemon, the ability to send and receive Taproot Assets will be smoothly brought to the developer community through the Lightning Network.