New upgrade to cushion overload

Lightning Labs Bitcoin developers have unveiled a protocol upgrade to mitigate blockchain overload from BRC-20 tokens. The recently rebranded “Taproot Assets Protocol” offers a more efficient method of minting assets on the blockchain. The developers shared that in one blog post from May 17th with.

More efficient transaction mode

Taproot Assets v0.2 “provides the core functionality for developers looking to spend, send, receive and discover assets on the Bitcoin blockchain,” according to the announcement. What makes it special: The latest version allows for the minting or moving of an unlimited number of assets in a single on-chain transaction. “For example, a user could mint three new tranches of three different assets at once, paying only a single miner fee.”

The Taproot Assets Protocol was designed to operate “maximum off-chain, specifically to avoid the kind of blockchain congestion we’ve been seeing lately.”

What is meant by this is the high demand for block space, which can be attributed primarily to the boom in BRC-20 tokens and NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain. As a result, there has been chaos on the fee market in recent weeks. On May 8, the average bitcoin transaction cost over $30. You can find everything about the situation around the Bitcoin blockspace in our current Week On-chain Report.

So far, the upgrade is available in a testnet version. Mainnet support is “available soon”. Also, according to Lightning Labs, protocol users will soon be able to integrate BRC-20 assets into the Lightning network.

Stablecoins on Lightning

The developers also announced that they would continue to work on the implementation of stablecoin integrations on the Lightning network. Making Lightning a “multi-asset network” and “particularly enabling stablecoin support for users in emerging markets” is Taproot Assets’ “ultimate goal”.

Because of a trademark dispute, the protocol formerly known as “Taro” had to be renamed and is now known as “Taproot Assets Protocol”.