Lightning Labs Introduces New Protocol Taro to Facilitate Stablecoin Transfers on Bitcoin
On Thursday, April 4, Lightning Labs announced that it has secured $70 million in funding for building an infrastructure that would enable users to send money globally almost instantaneously and affordably using the Bitcoin network.
Lightning Labs announced Taro, a new Taproot-powered protocol for issuing assets over the Bitcoin blockchain that can be transferred over the Lightning Network. The announcement notes that Taro will leverage the security and stability of the Bitcoin network as well as the scalability, speed, and low fess of the Lightning Network.
The $70 million Series B funding into Taro was led by Valor Equity Partners and joined by global asset manager Baillie Gifford. Lightning Labs introduced the Taproot upgrade Bitcoin network and the Taro protocol will further help to improve Bitcoin’s functionality.
As said, the Taro protocol will use the Lightning Network, a Layer-2 platform built atop the Bitcoin blockchain to improve network functionality, reduce congestion, and speed up transactions.
Speaking to CNBC, Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark said: “It’s one of those things where people don’t really know how the credit card system works – and it just works. With this technology, you could route all the world’s currencies through bitcoin. People will be able to seamlessly go between bitcoin and say, a USD stablecoin, or peso, euro, yen, etc. And they can send those globally, instantly and with extremely low fees”.
With the Taro protocol, Lightning Labs is willing to leverage the global interoperable bitcoin monetary network. Lightning Labs see Taro as a major step to serve as an underlying value transfer protocol of the internet.
Stark added: “From our standpoint, we’re particularly interested in the fiat and stablecoin aspects, because we’re really big into emerging markets. That’s something near and dear to our hearts. We’ve seen a lot of adoption there, and there’s a big demand for that.”
Lightning Labs further stated that Taro users Schnorr signatures for better scalability and simplicity. Besides, it also works with multi-hop transactions over Lightning. Additionally, Lightning Labs will also be releasing a series of Taro Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) for receiving feedback from the developer community.
The official press release notes: “The first step in getting Taro out to the world is releasing the draft protocol and its underlying components in a series of BIPs, and getting feedback from the community at large. The second step is to build the tooling that allows developers to issue and transfer arbitrary assets on-chain. The final step is to build functionality into Lightning that allows developers to open channels with Taro assets that can be sent over the existing Lightning Network. We are working on all three and invite the community to contribute.”