Key facts:
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Eclair allows immediate access, on the main network, of funds locked in a channel.
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In order to have immediate access in the chain, the Eclair database was redesigned.
Eclair Wallet 0.9.0 brings a set of improvements that make it easier to open and close Bitcoin Lightning payment channels. In other words, these enhancements are focused on providing liquidity and making the Lightning Network user experience easier, two of the biggest challenges for Lightning Network developers today.
Through publications Speaking on GitHub, Bastien Teinturier, Bitcoin and Lightning protocol developer and VP of Engineering at ACINQ, explained that “this release contains a lot of preparatory work for important (and complex) Lightning features: Dual Funding, Splicing, and Bolt offerings. 12”. They also improved the plugins, introducing mitigations for various types of denial of service (DoS) attacks.
ACINQ is a company that develops software to scale Bitcoin and is behind the maintenance and development of the Eclair software for Lightning nodes and the mobile phone wallet.
The most notable of the new features that Eclair 0.9.0 brings focus on an old Lightning network problem: find better methods to move liquidity in and out of the Lightning environment and the Bitcoin environment.
dual funding or dual financing at Eclair
Eclair software now “is updated to the most recent state of the dual financing specification [dual funding]”, explains Teinturier on GitHub. As Eclair implemented this feature, they made improvements to the implementation, with contributions from Tenturier and Fabrice Drouin, ACINQ’s founder and CTO. However, they warn that “feature is disabled by default, because the specification may not be final yet.”
Dual financing is a feature that came to the Lightning network in April 2021, as reported by CriptoNoticias. It allows the cost of opening a payment channel to be shared by the parties involved (user and node). In this way, a user can provide a part of the funds with a transaction on the Bitcoin network, while his counterpart completes the balance from the Lightning network.
Improvements to recent versions of shared funding channels are more secure, because they prevent the parties involved from revealing ownership of the UTXO (or unspent transaction, a bitcoin bill of sorts) that they are using to fund the channel. This grants greater privacy when creating channels with this function.
This version of the dual financing channel is based on the interactive transaction protocol for channel identification (channel-id). This protocol uses the base point revocation hash (hash of the revvocation-basepoints). In other words, stopped using the funding transaction id because this version uses RBF (a function that allows you to increase the commissions of a transaction to speed up its confirmation or cancel it), which allows a channel to have many identifications throughout its useful life.
prototype of splicing or Eclair joint
One of the limitations of the payment channels of the Lightning network is the requirement to block balance through an HTLC contract (hash time locked contract). Which means that until the payment channel is closed, that balance cannot be used outside of Lightning. Also, since channel closures are a Bitcoin transaction, funds are conditioned on confirmation times and on-chain fees.
He splicing or fillet is a function that fixes this. With this in mind, “Eclair now supports a custom prototype for splicing.” This is a different prototype from the current version, for which the developers have been including multiple improvements to the specification. The final feature will be included in a future version of Eclair.
Specifically, splicing allows funds to be transferred from a Bitcoin output or transaction to a Lightning payment channel or from a channel to separate outputs on the main chain, without having to wait for confirmation to spend the channel’s funds. In other words, You don’t need to close a channel and create a new one entirely to have liquidity on both networks.
Bolt 12 and other improvements
Regarding the improvements that are coming, “the database model has been completely reworked to handle splices”indicate its developers.
In addition, they indicate that they are working on the compatibility of Bolt 12, a protocol that allows the generation of invoices or invoices “static”. This implies thatFor example, a single payment order, expressed in a QR code, can make scheduled payments weekly, daily, hourly or even minute. It even allows you to automate other types of payments, such as those that Eclair will offer after its update.
Among the Lightning Network Bolt 12-related features that Eclair offers are two that automate buying or selling bitcoin through offers. Although they explain that this function is in the experimental phase.
For paid offers, Eclair will only request an invoice that matches the offered request. Eclair will pay it without further interaction. In order to receive offer payments, users will need to use a plugin where the offer is created and a controller is registered that accepts or rejects payment requests and invoices.
As Explain Teinturier on GitHub, “these features now are fully implemented in Eclair, but we are waiting for the specification work to finish and for other implementations to be ready for cross-compatibility testing.”
It cautions that these features should only be used if the user “knows what they’re doing and is ready to handle potential backwards incompatibility changes.”
