#24 - Major release, OmniBOLT, Bitcoin Culture and much more!
⚡ Everything at the intersection of the Lightning Network & Finance
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⚒️ Building
We have pushed a major release of LN Markets, with a new UI and some of your most requested features:
Cross margining: a game changer! You can now easily add (+) and reduce (-) margin to open positions clicking on the Actions part of the Open Positions blotter.
Adding margin to an open position, you reduce its leverage and decrease the probability of a liquidation event:
Removing margin from an existing position, you increase its leverage, but this will also increase your margin available for other positions and/or you can cash in and withdraw instantly this PL back to your wallet.
Trading alerts: you now get instant notifications for all trading events - order executions, changes, fills, cancels, etc.
Close All: click on the Close All button on the right upper hand side of the position blotter to close all your open positions at one go.
Login with credentials: no more need of paying 100 sats to create your account! You can now directly create your login and password for a more simple onboarding.
Our next release will include trailing stop loss. Please feel free to feed us on Twitter or Telegram with more requests!
Regarding Login methods on LN Markets, LNURL-Auth is taking the lead! It is an interesting trend, which makes sense to us since our native integrations to wallets (such as Breez and Blixt) and node managers (such as ThunderHub) leverage this protocol for instant account creation. More integrations coming soon!
🔩 OmniBOLT
The Omni Layer protocol may seem familiar! This protocol enables the issuance of tokens on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, the most famous being Tether (USDT), the first stablecoin whose issuance on Omni started in 2014.
The Omni Foundation is now supporting the development of OmniBolt (Omni Basis of Lightning Technology), a lightning network for smart assets. OmniBolt is working on “enabling faster and lower cost transactions of smart crypto assets, providing more flexible contracts for upper layer decentralized finance applications”.
The OmniBOLT Team has released has just released their latest version of OmniBOLT Daemon (OBD), a good time to catch up with them!
What is OmniBOLT?
OmniBOLT is a big extension of BOLT (Basis of Lightning Technology), the major parts of this specification are p2p instant payment for crypto-assets.
Simply, OmniBOLT is a lightning network for smart assets, issued on OmniBOLT via OmniLayer.
What are the main use cases we can build on OmniBOLT?
OmniBOLT is helping the Bitcoin network build its own DeFi (Decentralised Finance) System, or we may call it LiFi (Lightning Finance), which enables Lightning Network to be aware of multi assets like Tether (USDT) or even more permission-less chains. We can expect OmniBOLT to support high-frequency payments, gaming, peer-to-peer chat applications as well as exchanges, etc.
Is it ready for use? How can we set up an OmniBOLT node? Which wallets can we use to exchange "smart assets" over Lightning?
Yes, OmniBOLT is technically ready by now. We have prepared some nodes and APIs for the community to have access to the testnet.
We highly recommend everyone to start from the easy-to-handle 5-minute tutorial video we have on the GitHub repository:
For the wallet, we’re in touch with some well-known wallet partners including a wallet company supported by Tether (due to the contractual obligations we are not able to disclose the names yet).
How would you compare OmniBOLT to another "layer 3" protocol like RGB?
RGB is a good trial in making Bitcoin Lightning Network stronger and their solution is quite interesting but I must say that OmniBOLT takes more advantage of the native assets as we have over 1.3 billion USDT circulating on our settlement layer which is OmniLayer. We are also seasoned in "Layer 2" or so-called "Layer 3" solutions considering that Omni has existed for over 7 years and keeps growing.
What are your goals in terms of adoption for OmniBOLT?
The immediate goal is to let all the existing major crypto exchanges, as well as wallet companies, integrate with OmniBOLT as they’ve all supported OmniLayer and now, we are helping them add on the Lightning Network.
In the long term, we hope that OmniBOLT would be able to help people possess their privacy rights while making payments, p2p chats, or any transactions so we expect that in the future there would also be a lot of non-crypto trading needs for OmniBOLT.
🌱 Ecosystem
It’s just fascinating to watch the building blocks of a new internet based on Bitcoin layers emerging in real time!
Content monetization on Sphinx, the Lightning-based private messenger app, is gaining more and more traction. Paul Itoi, Sphinx’s founder, gave us a great overview of what it’s possible to build on top of it in a previous issue!
Head on to Paul’s podcast with Marty Bent for a deeper dive. Breez has also added a podcast player with instant payment to its wallet. And speaking of content monetization, cryptograffiti tweaked this concept specifically for producers/DJs.
The much anticipated Phoenix on iOS app is now in private beta in mainnet. Next step is to make the app publicly available!
Electrum wallet has released its v4.1.0, the second major release with support for theLightning Network. This release brings features (recoverable channels, trampoline payments, multi-part-payments, etc.) that are specifically aimed at keeping Electrum lightweight and trustless, while avoiding single points of failure.
The c-lightning team has announced the the v0.10.0 release of their Lightning implementation, which includes opening of channels with dual funding! Though this feature is still experimental, it enables both sides of a channel to contribute to its opening, instead of one side creating (and funding) the transaction used to open the channel.
Bitcoin voucher company Azteco has eloquently announced its support of Lightning:
“Bitcoin is for everyone on Earth, from the richest to the poorest, in every country, just like the Internet. And that is a very good thing.”
Sovryn, a trading & lending platform built on RSK sidechain, garnered attention with Anthony Pompliano submitting a proposal to “acquire 1.5m SOV and to join the Sovryn community. The syndicate proposes to provide capital to the Sovryn treasury, run SovrynBTC nodes, and provide broad strategic assistance to grow the Sovryn ecosystem.”
And as if we needed one, another teaser for “Mastering the Lightning Network”, the architecture diagram made by Rene Pickhardt:
✌️ Bitcoin Culture
A very practical, funny, full of insights read on how to set up your own Lightning routing node and “Routin’Omics 101” - managing liquidity, choosing the right peers, and defining a sustainable fee policy. Well done @FanisMichalakis & @GuerillaV2, we look forward to your Part 2!
And a mandatory read for every aspiring Bitcoin historian “The Blocksize war”! Jonathan Bier from BitMEX Research delivers a well-written, concise book, with a good balance between technical and psychological aspects of the conflict. Feel free to read the first chapters here before ordering it!
⚡ Bonus
🔁 Welcome to the Lightning circular economy
✨ Everyone needs some piece of good poetry
🎨 French artist Pascal Boyart auctioned “Dollars Assange” on Scarce City, with a winning bid at 1 BTC! 30% of the sale has been sent to support Assange. More on Scarce City here.
💸 The Board of Directors of MicroStrategy is now paid in Bitcoin
You can reach out to us on Twitter and Telegram.
Thank you for your support and let’s keep building the future of finance together!