Lightning Labs, Bitcoin (BTC) Lightning Network (LN) developer, has launched lnd 0.15 beta (v0.15-beta). The latest release intends to empower developers by leveraging the Bitcoin network’s latest features to create solutions for more use cases.
lnd 0.15 beta marks first Lightning Labs release in 2022
Lightning Labs’ product growth lead Michael Levin noted in the announcement that over 50 contributors helped launch the company’s first release in 2022.
“This release gives complete Taproot support for the internal lnd wallet, making it one of the most advanced Taproot wallets today,” Levin shared. “Further, this release has support for an experimental Musig2 API compliant with the latest BIP draft.”
MuSig2, a multi-signature scheme, introduces the ability to authorize transactions with Schnorr signatures by enabling the generation of aggregate public keys that may be utilized in Taproot outputs.
More reliable LN
In keeping with their promise to improve the LN’s dependability, robustness, and security, Lightning Labs added more flexibility over pathfinding choices, which finally assisted in lowering transaction fees by determining the lowest cost path.
Unlike earlier versions, the beta release removes redundant data from the revocation log bucket, resulting in a 95% reduction in database size during initial testing. While the upgrade does not reclaim space for existing states, Levin anticipates that a future release will contain a migration function that will allow previous disk space to be reclaimed.
On June 25, the Bitcoin network achieved the year’s lowest power usage of 10.65 gigatonnes (GW). As a result, the computing power required to mine BTC blocks has been reduced to 199.225 exahash per second (EH/s).
The dramatic drop in Bitcoin’s power consumption is directly proportional to the hash rate decrease. A crucial security indicator, the mining hash rate relates to the amount of computational power needed for BTC miners to successfully mine a block.