RGB compatible lightning node released

March 25, 2023

Bitfinex’s RGB team (the same behind Iris Wallet) announced rgb-lightning-sample is a fully working lightning node that supports moving and routing RGB assets inside lightning channels with the same security of regular bitcoin denominated channels.

The node is based on a (small) fork of rust-lightning, and it has been designed with the goal of minimising the differences from the original bitcoin-only project, so that long term maintainability does not become an issue. The main change from a traditional lightning node is that for every lightning funding, commitment and closing transaction, an extra output is added to contain the anchor (currently using opret) to the RGB state transition that allocates assets to the outputs of the lightning commitment transaction. In this way, if an old state of the channels get broadcast, the counter-party can trigger a punishment transaction both for the bitcoins and the RGB assets held in the channel. An explanation of how RGB Lightning channels work can be found here.

At the moment the software is still in a prototype stage, but it is already fully testable, both for simple payments in a channel and for routing across multiple channels.

GitHub of the project: https://github.com/RGB-Tools/rgb-lightning-sample