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Splicing

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About this project

Splicing is a proposal for BOLT 2, BOLT 7, and BOLT 9 that is maintained by Dusty Daemon.

At its core Splicing is a simple concept, the ability to resize Lightning channels. But what's become apparent over time is the ability to resize Lightning channels gives us many additional benefits that were not intuitively obvious at first, and will fundamentally improve the utility of Lightning.

There are really two sides to what Splicing brings:

  • User-facing improvements
  • Backend liquidity improvements

Splicing is the process of moving a lightning channel's funding utxo into a new "spliced" utxo. The exact steps involved are quite simple: sign the 2of2 multisignature transaction to a new location. Doing it in a trustless manner however, is not simple at all.

About Dusty

I have been working on Bitcoin code for five years and 1.5 years ago I decided to dedicate myself to programming for the Lightning network. I began by learning about Lightning in depth and making contributions to the CoreLightning project. I felt particularly accomplished rooting out some complex flakiness bugs and porting the project to MacOS.

I had heard of splicing in 2018 and saw it making the news rounds last year. On Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces bitcoiners were talking excitedly about using submarine swaps and I suggested people use splicing instead! The confused silence was palpable, no one had heard about it all. Diving in I realized only the splicing spec had been released — no one had actually written the code! So I decided I would take on the work of coding up the first implementation. By March of this year I had made the world’s first splice and published it on chain! You can see it here: twitter, mempool.

Since then I have been working on finishing up the proper & complete splice implementation. The code is now in a beta state which you can see here: PR #5675

I’m looking for funding to finish the code to a polished state, build a thorough testing framework, evangelize to companies that would benefit from splicing, and bring the implementation to the other Lightning node code bases.