RGB Panel at Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025
At the Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025 in Viareggio, Italy, three startups of the RGB Protocol on Bitcoin ecosystem met on stage: Renat Skitsan of ThunderStack (today Utexo), with infrastructure tools; Walter Maffione of KaleidoSwap, a DEX on RGB and Lightning; and Anant Tapadia of Bitcoin Tribe, a wallet for end users. Birkan Kayadibi, co-founder of RGB Protocol Association, moderated the panel and took stock of the ecosystem with them.
Watch the full panel in the video below.
Note: the panel dates back to May 2025. The products and plans in this article reflect the state of the projects at the time.
In Brief
- Why RGB: peer-to-peer, with no federation, no sidechain, and no other token; private, scalable, and open to every Bitcoin layer
- Trading on Lightning: no deposits, no front running, low fees, and no wait for confirmations
- UX: sats as fuel, and the technology in the background
- Infrastructure: RGB data needs a backup besides the seed phrase, and Lightning nodes need hosting
- The common challenge: education for users, developers, and partners
Why RGB, and Why Lightning for Trading
Birkan opened with a question on the choice of RGB over any other protocol. For Anant, the Bitcoin Tribe team had evaluated many technologies, inside and outside Bitcoin, before the choice of RGB and RGB on Lightning: RGB is fully peer-to-peer, with no federation, no sidechain operator, no other blockchain, and no token of its own, and besides the ideology it offers more scalability, more privacy, and the longevity of Bitcoin. Walter, a Bitcoiner, wanted to build on Bitcoin only and saw RGB as the most advanced way to run smart contracts on Bitcoin, with no data on the blockchain and no dust for other users. Renat stressed privacy, since people and companies have no wish to show their business on a public ledger, and pointed out that RGB is not tied to a single layer and can work on top of Lightning, Ark, Cashu, Fedimint, and future layers. On trading on Bitcoin compared with DeFi on Ethereum, Walter listed the advantages of Lightning: users never deposit funds, because HTLCs make each swap atomic, so a DEX shutdown cannot cost them their money; nobody can front run a trade; fees are a few sats, and payments arrive in seconds, with no wait for block confirmations.
User Experience, Infrastructure, and Education
Anant explained the approach of Bitcoin Tribe: users have no need to learn about colored UTXOs, so the wallet presents sats as fuel for RGB transactions, like fuel for a car, and handles the rest, with ideas from other crypto apps and banking apps and almost daily talks with users. Renat described the infrastructure challenge. On Bitcoin layer 1, RGB is simpler, but to restore an RGB wallet users need the seed phrase and their RGB data, a kind of data outside the design of most wallets, so ThunderStack built an encrypted backup, restorable with the seed phrase. On Lightning the challenge is bigger, because a non-custodial wallet needs a Lightning node for each user, so ThunderStack chose the cloud, with isolated nodes for each customer. All three saw education as the hardest part. Walter mentioned the wait for mainnet readiness and the need to explain backups of both RGB state and Lightning channels; Anant compared RGB to Bitcoin years ago, when every conversation started from scratch, and noted the work to train new developers; for Renat, RGB needed simplicity and education, and its core idea is easy to grasp, since RGB resembles digital cash, private by default. As milestones, Renat aimed at mainnet support and a simple SDK to bring RGB to any application, Walter at mainnet readiness, an SDK for wallets, a peer-to-peer marketplace over Nostr, and a standard for swaps on Lightning, and Anant at a large pilot with at least one liquid issuer on board.
The full panel is in the video above. For more videos from the RGB ecosystem, follow @RGB_Bitcoin.
Further Reading
- Lightning Finance on RGB: Walter Maffione at Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025
- RGB Infrastructure for Businesses: Renat Skitsan at Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025
- Bitcoin Tribe Wallet: Anant Tapadia at Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025
Panel recorded at the Tuscany Lightning Summit 2025, Viareggio, Italy. Video on the RGB Protocol YouTube channel.
