Lightning Labs, one of the leading cryptocurrency companies pioneering layer two scaling solutions à la the Lightning Network, has marked its first major release of the the Lightning Network Daemon (lnd), their integration of the technology. Olaoluwa Osuntokun, CTO of the group, said of the release on Github:

“This marks the first major release in the v0.10.0 series! This release contains several new features including support for sender-side MPP payment splitting, PSBT channel funding, and much more. Notably, this release also includes a new experimental commitment type (anchor commitments). As usual, this release also contains a number of optimizations and bug fixes.”

Notable changes include an update to Multi-Path Payments (MPP) with the sending limit being lifted from ‘4.2 million satoshis (0.042 BTC) to the maximum size of a channel which is currently 16.7 million satoshis (0.167 BTC).

“MPP allows for larger-sized payments as well as potentially more efficient payment routing.”

Support for Partially Signed Transactions (PST) has also made its way in this release allowing users to fund and open lightning channels directly from 3rd party wallets that also include support for PST. It will also introduce the ability to open multiple channels from a single transaction which can greatly improve efficiency on the network.

“In prior versions of lnd, BTC had to be first moved into lnd’s wallet before payment channels could be opened.”

Another change comes in the form of an Anchor Commitment Format for on chain fees, Bryan Vu, Lightning Labs VP of product explains:

“With the original Lightning protocol, one of the challenges was that the fee amount to be used for force closing a channel on-chain had to be negotiated and agreed upon ahead of time. Throughout most of the lifetime of Lightning, this hasn’t been a problem because fees have been relatively low and predictable. However, in cases where a channel might be open for long periods of time in which fees could go up significantly, or when a channel is opened during times of volatile on-chain fees, incorrect fee estimation or prediction could make emergency channel closing unreliable.”

These Anchor Commitments would allow for users to increase the fee of their channel closing commitment after it has been published, meaning in times of excess on-chain demand parties can now ensure a channel closes in a timely manner.

The group have also announced lnd is taking steps to improve its architecture by introducing a database abstraction layer ‘that makes it possible to use different databases with lnd than the default bbolt’.

“In order to make lnd nodes more robust to hardware or network failures, we’re making database changes that will make it possible to have multiple copies of channel databases that can seamlessly resume transaction processing in case of an unexpected failure.” … “The first new database we’re planning to support is etc. A related change makes lnd itself more modular and more customizable by developers.”

Regarding privacy, lightning labs have made it possible to deploy lnd and Tor ‘more safely’, as well as adding support for deploying Watchtowers via a Tor Hidden Service.

lnd is the leading implementation of the Lightning Network and the only version with Litecoin support making it the best way for users to test out the infrastructure. Loshan, a notable Litecoin project developer, wrote in response to the news via reddit:

“…if you’re looking for the best ltc support in lnd, the LTCFoundation have their own fork of lnd available at: github.com/ltcsuite/lnd
I will be updating it to 0.10.0 soon.”