Bitcoin (BTC) users have been given a possibly more efficient way to mint new assets on the blockchain aft an updated edition of the recently-rebranded Taproot Assets Protocol was released by Lightning Labs.
In a May 16 blog post, Lightning Network infrastructure firm Lighting Labs criticized the current methods by which assets are inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain calling them “particularly efficient” and pointed to cumbersome protocols that write asset metadata “directly into block space.”
Today we're excited to announce the newest version of Taproot Assets , a scalable protocol to issue assets on #bitcoin and Lightning.With this release, developers have the core set of features to bitcoinize the dollar in a chain-efficient manner! ⛓️https://t.co/7WmeDjNnM2
The Taproot Assets Protocol is designed to operate “maximally off-chain” in order to avoid the network congestion that has become an unfortunate characteristic of the Bitcoin network since the inception of the BRC-20 token standard by anonymous developer “Domo” on March 8.
Lightning Labs said Protocol users can soon integrate BRC-20 assets into the Lightning Network, with wallets, exchanges and merchants ported over instead of needing to “bootstrap a new ecosystem” from scratch.
Domo has previously said the Taproot Assets Protocol is a far “better solution” for minting new assets on Bitcoin when compared to the pre-existing methods like JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), as it allows for users to easily transfer to the Lightning network for “fast and cheap transactions.”
The overwhelming majority of BRC-20 tokens created thus far utilize Ordinal inscriptions of JSON data to deploy token contracts, mint tokens and transfer them.
This method has drawn widespread criticism
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