Lightning Labs announces first major release of lnd with v0.10.0

Lightning Labs, one of the leading cryptocurrency companies pioneering a layer 2 scaling solution called Lightning Network, has announced the first major release of its technology integration, the Lightning Network Daemon (lnd). Olaoluwa Osuntokun, the group’s CTO, said of the release on Github:

“This is the first major release for the industry. v0.10.0 series! This release includes several new features, including sender-side MPP payment splitting, PSBT channel funding, and more. Notably, this release also includes a new experimental promise type (anchor promise). As usual, this release also includes various optimizations and bug fixes.”

Notable changes include a Multi-Path Payment (MPP) update where the transfer limit was raised from 4.2 million satoshi (0.042 BTC) to the maximum size of the channel, which is now 16.7 million satoshi (0.167 BTC).

“MPP allows for larger payments as well as potentially more efficient payment pathways.”

Support for Partially Signed Transactions (PST) is also included in this release. This allows users to fund and open Lightning channels directly from third-party wallets with PST support. It can also significantly improve network efficiency by introducing the ability to open multiple channels in a single transaction.

“In previous versions of lnd, opening a payment channel required first transferring BTC to lnd’s wallet.”

Another change comes in the form of anchor promise formats for chain fees, explains Lightning Labs VP of Product Bryan Vu:

“One of the challenges of the original Lightning Protocol was that the amount of fees used to force closure of on-chain channels had to be negotiated and agreed upon in advance. This wasn’t a problem because fees were relatively low and predictable throughout Lightning’s entire lifespan. However, if a channel is open for an extended period of time and fees may rise significantly, or if the channel is opened during a time when on-chain fees fluctuate, an emergency channel closure may be destabilizing due to incorrect fee estimates or forecasts. ”

These anchor promises allow users to increase their fees after a channel closure promise is published. This means that if on-chain demand exceeds, parties can now close channels in a timely manner.

The group also announced that lnd is taking steps to improve its architecture by introducing a database abstraction layer that ‘allows the use of databases other than the default bbolt’.

“To make the lnd node more robust against hardware or network failures, we are changing the database so that we can have multiple copies of the channel database that can seamlessly resume transaction processing if an unexpected failure occurs.” … “The first new databases we will support are: Related changes make lnd itself more modular and easier for developers to customize.”

When it comes to privacy, Lightning Lab has not only enabled ‘more secure’ deployments of lnd and Tor, but has also added support for Watchtowers deployments via the Tor Hidden Service.

lnd is the leading implementation of the Lightning Network and the only version that supports Litecoin, making it the best way for users to test the infrastructure. Loshan, a popular Litecoin project developer, wrote about this news via Reddit:

“…if you’re looking for the best ltc support in lnd, LTCFoundation has their own fork of lnd at github.com/ltcsuite/lnd. They’ll be updating to 0.10.0 soon.”