By
Temitope Olatunji
March 7th, 2024
Developers behind Lightning Labs released the 0.3 alpha version of the Lightning Network Daemon, offering a number of new features including Bitcoin & Litecoin swaps.
Lightning Labs has launched the third major release for the Lightning Network Daemon (LND) right after the Segwit protocol was activated.
Osuntokun, Lightning Labs developer, explains via the team’s Github repo:
This release marks the third major release for LND. With this release, LND is now has gained a considerable feature set, a new automatic channel management operating mode, RPC authentication, additional persistence logic, and further major strides towards complete spec compliance.
Notable changes added to the LND infrastructure include the following:
- TLS integration;
- Macaroon-based RPC;
- “Self-Driving Lightning” which provides plans for automatic channel management;
- new bitcoin light client operating mode that enables users to run a standalone light client;
- and, most intriguing, “Litecoin Operating Mode”, which means that the Lightning Labs team has added support for the Litecoin blockchain and an LTC backend.
To put the latter in a more simple way, LND is now can quickly switch between the bitcoin and litecoin chains. This multi-chain feature this means that in the near future LND nodes will be able to acts as a border node between the two networks, facilitating instant swaps and transfers between the two chains.
While crypto enthusiasts may not be able to wait until they can experience all the advantages of the Lightning Network Daemon 3.0, developers behind Lightning Labs advise individuals to use testnet coins, and wait until the team is closer to mainnet usage, for the sake of security. In addition, as the new LND release contains a number of major changes, its users need to upgrade to a latest installation, or remove their existing “channel.db” database.
According to the Lightning Labs’ team, the next release will provide safety measures before applying the protocol to the mainnet mode.
Meanwhile, Tadge Dryja, creator of the Lightning Network, is developing an experimental tool which is expected to help bitcoin users safely claim their newly created bitcoin cash.
Called Goodelivery, the new tool is aimed to give users another option for safely splitting off the bitcoin cash tokens and moving them elsewhere. However, users shouldn’t make real transactions with it right now, according to Tadge Dryja.
While Lightning’s introduction marks a major milestone in the Bitcoin network’s journey, concerns are already mounting about the implications of a second hard fork in the form of SegWit2x to be activated at block 494,784.
To recap, SegWit’s activation brings a few key changes or improvements in the bitcoin network, to put it shortly these are:
- rearrangement of data storage mechanisms and significant optimization of bitcoin blocks;
- increased block size;
- removal of transaction malleability.
Along with that, the Lightning Network team and The Bitfury Group, created a new hybrid routing solution, called Flare, that will increase transaction volumes in the bitcoin blockchain network.