Important facts:
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Eclair provides instant access to funds locked in a channel on the main network.
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In order to have instant access in the chain, the Eclair database has been redesigned.
Eclair Wallet 0.9.0 brings a number of improvements that make it easier to open and close Bitcoin Lightning payment channels. In other words, these improvements are focused on providing liquidity and simplifying the Lightning Network user experience, two of the biggest challenges facing Lightning Network developers today.
Through publications Speaking on GitHub, Bastien Teinturier, Bitcoin and Lightning protocol developer and VP of Engineering at ACINQ, stated that “this release includes 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 Bitcoin scaling software company and is behind the maintenance and development of Eclair software for Lightning nodes and mobile phone wallet.
The most notable new features that Eclair 0.9.0 brings focus on an old Lightning network issue: Find better ways to move liquidity in and out of the Lightning and Bitcoin ecosystems.
double funding or double financing at Eclair
Eclair software now “will be updated to the latest dual finance specification [dual funding]”, explains Teinturier on GitHub. When Eclair implemented this feature, the company made improvements to the implementation with input from Tenturier and Fabrice Drouin, ACINQ Founder and CTO. However, they warn that “the feature is disabled by default as the specification may not be final yet.”
As CriptoNoticias reports, dual funding is a feature that was introduced to the Lightning Network in April 2021. This allows the cost of opening a payment channel to be shared by the parties involved (users and nodes). In this way, a user can provide part of the money with a transaction on the Bitcoin network, while their counterpart handles the rest via the Lightning network.
Improvements to newer versions of shared funding channels are safer because they prevent the parties involved from disclosing ownership of the UTXO (or an unspent transaction, a type of Bitcoin bill) they are using to fund the channel. This ensures more privacy when creating channels with this feature.
This version of the dual funding channel is based on the interactive transaction log for channel identification (Channel ID). This protocol uses the base point revocation hash (Hash of revvocation basepoints). In other words, Discontinued use of Funding Transaction ID as this version uses RBF (a feature that allows you to increase the commissions of a transaction to speed up its confirmation or cancel it) that allows a channel to have many identifications throughout its lifetime.
prototype of Splice or eclair joint
One of the limitations of the Lightning Network payment channels is the requirement to block the credit through an HTLC contract (Hash Time Locked Contract). This means the credit cannot be used outside of Lightning until the payment channel is closed. Additionally, since channel closures are a bitcoin transaction, funds are subject to confirmation times and on-chain fees.
He Splice or filet is a function that solves this problem. With that in mind, Eclair “now supports a custom prototype for splicing.” This is a different prototype than the current release, for which the developers have made several improvements to the specification. The last feature will be included in a future version of Eclair.
In particular, splicing allows funds to be transferred from a Bitcoin outlet or transaction to a Lightning payment channel or from a channel to separate outlets in the main chain without having to wait for confirmation to spend the channel’s funds. In other words, You don’t have to close a channel and create a whole new one to have liquidity on both networks.
Bolt 12 and other improvements
As for the upcoming improvements, “The database model has been completely redesigned to handle splices.”indicate its developers.
In addition, they state that they are working on the compatibility of Bolt 12, a protocol that allows the generation of bills and invoices, respectively bills “static”. That implies thatFor example, a single payment order expressed in a QR code can execute scheduled payments weekly, daily, hourly or even to the minute. It even allows you to automate other payment methods, such as those that Eclair will offer after the update.
Among the Lightning Network Bolt 12-related features that Eclair is offering are two that automate the buying or selling of bitcoin through bids. Although they explain that this feature is in the experimental phase.
For paid offers, Eclair will only request an invoice that matches the request offered. Eclair will pay for it without further interaction. In order to receive offer payments, users 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, However, we are waiting for the specification work to be completed and for other implementations to be ready for cross-compatibility testing.”
It notes that these features should only be used if the user “knows what they’re doing and is willing to deal with possible backwards incompatibility changes.”