LND version 0.15 launched, supporting Taproot- The Cryptonomist

Yesterday Lightning Labs officially announced the launch of the new version 0.15 of LND, thus supporting Taproot on LN.

Announcing lnd 0.15 beta: To Taproot and Beyond! ♾️

Featuring:
?Taproot + Musig2 support for better privacy + efficiency, Taro soon™
? ~95% database space reduction for new data
?️ New pathfinding tool to choose speed vs. cost of payments

Read more: https://t.co/5pavMcpxBg

— Lightning Labs⚡️? (@lightning) June 28, 2022

Lightning Network implements Taproot update

LND (Lightning Network Daemon) is the software from Lightning Labs that allows an LN (Lightning Network) node to be installed and managed independently. 

The main change lies in the integration of Taproot and MuSig2 in order to achieve a higher level of privacy and greater efficiency. 

In addition, the space taken up in the database by the new data has been reduced by 95%, and a new tool has been introduced to decide whether to prioritize speed or payment savings. 

The announcement also reveals that Taro features will soon be added. 

This new version offers full Taproot support for the internal wallet, making it one of the most advanced Taproot wallets around at the moment. In fact, LND can now generate P2TR addresses for receiving and sending via bech32m. and allows the use of the new PSBT extensions. 

The new version 0.15 also adds support for an experimental Musig2 API that conforms to the latest BIP draft. This is an experimental feature because something in this respect could theoretically still change. The integration of Musig2-based multiparty access into the various LND systems has just begun, so more may come in the future. 

In response to a common user request, redundant data has been removed from the log bucket to reduce database size and improve node performance. Initial tests show that users can expect about a 95% reduction in disk space consumed by new channel updates. 

The improvements introduced in this new v0.15-beta release provide developers and users with access to the latest Bitcoin protocol enhancements, such as Taproot and Musig2, with huge advances over the previous version 0.14.

Recent activity on Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. 

It is worth noting that the number of active LN nodes in the world has started to decline since late March, after hitting an all-time high at over 20,700. The steepest drop occurred after mid-April, when they fell below 16,500, but since then it has returned slightly to an upward trend. The current level is similar to that of October 2021. 

A similar trend was followed by the number of channels, although these decreased less. The peak occurred again in mid-March near 88,000, while now they have fallen to just over 83,000. 

Maintaining a node on Lightning Network generates costs, albeit minimal, and since revenue is received in BTC if its market value goes down it may become unprofitable to run the node. 

Instead, channels are what are used for BTC transactions on LN at very low cost, so their number is much less dependent on the market price of Bitcoin.