RGB Infrastructure for Businesses: Renat Skitsan at Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025
At the Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025 in Viareggio, Italy, Renat Skitsan, founder of ThunderStack, presented his company, a set of tools to simplify the use of RGB Protocol on Bitcoin for developers and businesses. ThunderStack has since rebranded to Utexo.
Watch the full interview in the video below.
Note: the interview dates back to May 2025. The products and plans in this article reflect the state of the project at the time.
In Brief
- Why RGB: client-side validation brings privacy, with the security of Bitcoin
- Four building blocks: a cloud service for nodes, Lightning as a service, encrypted backups of RGB data, and ThunderLink for merchants
- The data question: an RGB wallet has to keep its own data, and a backup restorable with the seed phrase keeps the experience close to a Bitcoin wallet
- Next steps at the time: mainnet support and a remote signer for full non-custody
Why RGB, and Why ThunderStack
Renat discovered RGB as a shift in paradigm compared with everything else in the blockchain space: instead of a network of nodes that validates every state, each user validates only the data of interest, on the client side. Privacy had always been a priority for him, and RGB was the best tool for privacy on top of the security of Bitcoin, so with a background in enterprise infrastructure and security, he started ThunderStack to bring RGB to scale. ThunderStack offered a toolbox for businesses and developers, with each tool for a specific problem. The base was a cloud service with Bitcoin nodes, Lightning nodes, and the RGB libraries, updates included, so a company could build on RGB with no infrastructure team. On top of it, Lightning as a service provided a library and an API to spin up a Lightning node on the fly for each end user of a wallet or an exchange, with support for sending and receiving RGB assets.
Backups, Payments, and Next Steps
The third tool covered data backups. With client-side validation, users have to keep their own data, and a lost state is impossible to recover from the blockchain, so ThunderStack built a protocol for encrypted backups, restorable at any time with the seed phrase. The fourth, ThunderLink, was an SDK for merchants and websites to accept RGB payments with no infrastructure or liquidity on their side: the merchant kept the keys, and ThunderStack handled RGB versions, updates, and security patches. A first integration was already live with the Bitcoin Tribe wallet, but ThunderStack was still on testnet, waiting for RGB mainnet support before a new version. The other next steps were full non-custody for Lightning as a service, through a remote signer for the RGB Lightning Node, and the integration of ThunderLink into wallets and apps, also for payments on Bitcoin layer 1 with no Lightning at all.
Since Then
ThunderStack has rebranded to Utexo, and today the Utexo documentation describes an RLN remote signer based on VLS. For the latest status, visit utexo.com.
The full interview is in the video above. For more videos from the RGB ecosystem, follow @RGB_Bitcoin.
Further Reading
- RGB HUB Community Call – Discover ThunderStack: RGB-Powered Innovation
- Betting Stablecoins Future on RGB
- RGB Panel at Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025
Interview recorded at the Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025, Viareggio, Italy. Video on the RGB Protocol YouTube channel.
