Lightning Labs, a Layer 2 infrastructure developer for Bitcoin, has released its Taproot Alpha protocol on the Mainnet.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Lightning Labs’ head of business development Ryan Gentry, explained that the new release would be a feature-complete developer experience for bringing stablecoins and other assets onto the Bitcoin blockchain.
Announcing the first mainnet release of Taproot Assets 🥕, a protocol for assets on #bitcoin and Lightning.
With this release, developers can issue financial assets on-chain in a scalable manner. 💱
Today marks a new era of multi-asset bitcoin. 🌅https://t.co/2cNvZSvv8v
— Lightning Labs⚡️🍠 (@lightning) October 18, 2023
“With Taproot Assets v0.3, builders have all the tools needed to make bitcoin a multi-asset network, but in a scalable manner that upholds bitcoin’s core values,” said Gentry.
“We believe this new era for bitcoin will see a myriad of global currencies issued as Taproot Assets, and the world’s foreign exchange transactions settled instantly over the Lightning Network,” added Gentry.
The protocol will route assets through the existing Bitcoin liquidity at the core of the network, allowing routing nodes to forward Taproot Assets on Lightning.
“This is how we make bitcoin the global routing network for the internet of money. This is how we bitcoinize the dollar and the world’s financial assets.
Earlier this year, Unchained reported Lightning Labs’s unveiling of Taproot Assets, a rebranded version of the project that was known as “Taro.” At the time, Lightning Labs asked developers to join in building and testing code on the protocol, pitching multi-asset transactions as a way to save chain space.
According to Lightning Labs, early adopters have already minted 2,000 assets on the testnet and synced their nodes with the Universe server over 420,000 times.
