Bitcoin Lightning Network developer updates node software with Taproot support

Lightning Labs, a developer from the Bitcoin (BTC) Lightning Network (LN), released a beta form of the Lightning Network Daemon (lnd) — an entire implementation from the LN node — with added support towards the latest protocol upgrades including Taproot and Musig2 among other enhancements.

lnd is really a software ingredient that handles various aspects inside the LN including building a database, generating payment invoices and revoking payments to mention a couple of. The most recent software release, named lnd .15 beta (v0.15-beta), aims to empower developers to produce solutions for additional use cases by leveraging the Bitcoin network’s latest abilities.

Within the announcement, Lightning Labs’ product growth lead Michael Levin says 50 plus contributors took part in launching their first release around 2022, adding that:

“This release gives complete Taproot support for that internal lnd wallet, which makes it probably the most advanced Taproot wallets today. Further, this release has support to have an experimental Musig2 API compliant using the latest BIP draft.”

The main objective of MuSig2, a multi-signature plan, would be to allow the development of aggregate public keys you can use in Taproot outputs, thus, presenting the opportunity to authorize transactions with Schnorr signatures.

Unlike previous versions, the beta release also removes the redundant data in the revocation log bucket, which demonstrated a discount of 95% in database size during initial testing. As the update doesn’t reclaim space for existing states, Levin envisioned that the follow-up release can include a migration feature that may reclaim old disk space.

Remaining in keeping with their commitment to help make the LN more reliable, robust, and secure, Lightning Labs introduced greater control of pathfinding preferences — ultimately assisting to lessen the transaction charges by identifying the cheapest cost route.

Related: Bitcoin network power demand falls to 10.65GW as hash rate sees 14% drop

The Bitcoin network recorded the entire year 2022’s cheapest power need for 10.65 gigawatts (GW) on June 25. Consequently, the computing power for mining BTC blocks came lower to 199.225 exahash per second (EH/s).

Bitcoin network power demand from 2018-2022. Source: ccaf.io

The sudden decrease in Bitcoin’s power demand is directly correlated towards the falling hash rate. The mining hash rate matches the computing power needed by BTC miners to effectively mine a block — a vital security metric.

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