Lightning Finance on RGB: Walter Maffione at Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025
At the Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025 in Viareggio, Italy, Walter Maffione, CTO and co-founder of KaleidoSwap, explained why he decided to build a decentralized exchange on RGB Protocol on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, and what was next on the KaleidoSwap roadmap.
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 a DEX on Lightning: RGB brings assets to Bitcoin and Lightning, and trading is one of the first use cases
- Atomic by design: Lightning payments either complete or fail as a whole, so RGB swaps need no trust and no custody
- Roadmap: an SDK for wallets, peer-to-peer trading over Nostr, and swaps between RGB and Taproot Assets
- Lightning finance: more liquidity in Lightning channels, also for users with no interest in assets
Atomic Swaps on RGB and Lightning
Walter started from his interest in sovereign technologies. RGB brings digital assets to Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, and for him the trading of those assets was one of the most needed use cases: a decentralized exchange on Lightning lets users swap assets with no intermediary and keep their own keys. According to Walter, the key is the HTLC, the mechanism behind every Lightning payment. A Lightning payment either reaches its destination in full or fails, and RGB uses the same network to move assets, so a swap of two assets can work in the same way: atomically, with no trust and no custody. Compared with trading on Ethereum and similar chains, he listed three advantages, namely no wait for block confirmations, no front running, and much lower fees, with Lightning as a “common language” for all RGB users.
The KaleidoSwap Roadmap at the Time
At the time of the interview, KaleidoSwap was an open source desktop application at version 0.1, with a new release in preparation, and Walter described three next steps. The Kaleido SDK would offer APIs for wallet providers, to add atomic RGB swaps through the KaleidoSwap market maker. Peer-to-peer trading over Nostr would bring low latency over websockets and an identity layer for reputation, so anyone could act as a market maker, with no central server. The Kaleido proxy would enable swaps between different protocols through Lightning HTLCs: in his example, a merchant could receive USDT on Taproot Assets while the customer pays in bitcoin or with an RGB asset, with no direct channel between the two. In his broader view, trading on Lightning would bring more liquidity and more investment into Lightning channels, to the benefit of all Bitcoin users, even users with no interest in assets at all.
Since Then
Several of these plans moved forward. In August 2025 Tether announced USDT on RGB, and on September 30, 2025 KaleidoSwap executed the first RGB asset swap on Lightning mainnet. For the latest status, visit kaleidoswap.com.
The full interview is in the video above. For more videos from the RGB ecosystem, follow @RGB_Bitcoin.
Further Reading
- Sovereign Trading on RGB Lightning: Walter Maffione Demos the First KaleidoSwap MVP
- Trustless Trading on Bitcoin: RGB Assets and Atomic Swaps
- RGB Panel at Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025
Interview recorded at the Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025, Viareggio, Italy. Video on the RGB Protocol YouTube channel.
