The lightning network is owing for a solitude boost.
That's according to Dr. Ayo Akinyele, a computer scientist who has listening carefully his efforts on structure a zcash implementation of anonymous off-chain payment architecture called BOLT. And today that work was published on GITHUB
First conceived by zcash founders Matthew Green and Ian Miers in 2016, the code is enthused by the bitcoin scaling solution, lightning network, and seeks to unlock high levels of contract throughput while adding payment discretion.
"The lightning network has solved the initial matter with scalability, and now that gives us the opportunity to deal with the time alone difficulty. That is the potency of the BOLT design,".
Using blind signatures and zero-knowledge proofs, BOLT obscures transactions, balances and sender and receiver identities. Plus, because it's built to function along with privacy-leaning cryptocurrency zcash, users can open a channel using shielded transactions, thereby anonymizing the initial association to the system.
"BOLT is one move toward that could lead to very promising results for privacy, and I'm excited to be on the front line of pursuing that," Akinyele said.
Today's release allows for the "bidirectional" use case — or payment channels that can move funds back and forth between two participants.
In order to be activated on the cryptocurrency, new code would call for to be added to the zcash repository, in what is called a "soft fork" — or a type of change that doesn't require all versions of the software to keep posted.
Going forward, the team behind BOLT is hoping to follow a similar progress plan to the lightning network itself — deploying it as an open test net to allow users to battle test the software.
"It would be overwhelming to deploy this, similar to what lightning had done, and allow people to test on the testnet and then gradually get toward the mainnet," Akinyele said.
And while the current release has been boosted for zcash, in the prospect, Akinyele plans to build up it as a privacy conservatory for the lightning network itself, telling CoinDesk:
"The next step is to retrofit these properties to bitcoin and litecoin on the lightning network, probably as a shielded transaction option, similar to what zcash offers now."