BitLight Whitepaper

The development of Bitcoin's Layer 2 (L2) ecosystem aims to address the base layer's inherent limits on throughput and programmability. However, many existing solutions introduce a challenging trade-off between non-custodial asset security and the operational usability required for a seamless user experience, often forcing users to manage continuously online "hot wallets."

Today, we are pleased to publish the technical whitepaper for BitLight, a system architecture designed to address these challenges through a novel integration of existing Bitcoin-native technologies.

BitLight's approach is not to create a new consensus protocol, but to systematically integrate the RGB protocol for client-side validated assets with the Lightning Network for instant payments. This layered architecture is built upon Bitcoin L1, utilizing advanced features like Taproot for final security and settlement.

The core technical contribution proposed in the paper is a "separation of operation and signing" model. This design functionally decouples the network-facing operations of an L2 node from the user's private key signing authority. The goal is to reduce the security risks and operational overhead associated with L2 interactions, allowing for highly available services without exposing signing keys to an always-online environment.

Read the Full Whitepaper

For a complete technical breakdown of the layered design, the interaction protocols, and the security model, we invite developers, researchers, and the wider Bitcoin community to review the full whitepaper.

Link to the Whitepaper: https://github.com/bitlightlabs/whitepaper (opens in a new tab)