Lightning Labs Introduces Taproot, Musig2 in Beta Version of Lightning Network Daemon

Lightning Labs has announced the release of the beta version of the Lightning Network Daemon (lnd). The firm has revealed incorporating several improvements in the new – v0.15-beta. The main idea is to offer developers and users access to the “latest and greatest” Bitcoin protocol upgrades that include Taproot and Musig2.

Taproot and Experimental Musig2

According to the official blog post, Lightning Labs’ product growth lead Michael Levin announced that more than 50 contributors participated in launching the firm’s first release in 2022.

“Since 0.14, we’ve made immense progress to better meet the needs of our developer community. We’re excited to deliver this technology to our builder community around the world to see what amazing use cases they can bring to users.”

Its latest release will give complete Taproot support for the internal lnd wallet, which will be able to generate P2TR addresses for receiving and sending via bech32m. Support for an experimental Musig2 API compliant with the latest BIP draft has also been added in v0.15-beta.

Taproot was activated in November 2021 after receiving 90% consensus. Prior to the upgrade, Bitcoin used the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) to generate keys and verify transactions. The Taproot soft fork aimed to make Bitcoin more private, secure, and scalable.

It brought Schnorr Signatures to reduce network burdens and made it possible to conduct multi-signature multi-input transactions (UTXI) a lot easier, faster, and cheaper.

Other Key Improvements

Meanwhile, the new release comes with a 95% reduction in the database size by removing redundant data from the revocation log bucket. In contrast to its previous versions, the v0.15-beta is also expected to improve node performance.

Furthermore, Lightning Labs has also incorporated greater control for its users over pathfinding preferences. This addition will essentially give users choice with regard to different payments, meaning – they can select different options based on their needs over time and cost tradeoffs. The company has come up with advanced developer tooling for liquidity service providers.