After presenting the construction of the MRTTREE smart contract in part 1 we can now proceed to show how to use it to build split tickets. Funding and Purchasing the Ticket A Loop Out MRTTREE construction is used to perform the funding for the ticket. In the first coordination step, users and provider build the utxo that will be used as input to the ticket being purchased. Given this is a Loop Out, the provider requires both the off-chain inbound bandwidth (to receive the off-chain contributions) and on-chain coins under its control (that it will grant to the group of users). ... Read More

TL;DR This proposes a Smart Contract construct tailored to the use case of a group of users which wish to collectively pool their funds into a single utxo and then be able to redeem these funds either cooperatively off-chain via LN or uncooperatively on-chain safely, in a non-custodial way and with the smallest possible impact to the blockchain. We can achieve this by creating a new opcode, using a series of transactions with scripts inspired by LN Submarine Swaps[3] [4] , Channel Factories[5] [6] and HTLCs[1] and a special service offered by an entity willing to swap funds between the two layers. ... Read More

The Lightning Network peer-to-peer payment protocol promises to deliver the scalability, privacy and speed needed to spur crypto’s mass adoption. At the end of 2017, Decred activated the on-chain consensus rules required to develop DCR Lightning Network. The approval of this change was nearly unanimous at 99.50%, and developers began working on building the foundation for LN features. Today, the Decred development team is proud to unveil this pivotal work: the official testnet release for dcrlnd - our Lightning Network wallet and node software! ... Read More

DCP0004 has just been released for appreciation by the stakeholders and will (hopefully) be held for voting in the next few months. But what is the importance of it? TL;DR The 1.4.0rc1 and rc2 release candidates had an unintended change that caused several reorgs due to miners allowing transactions in blocks that previous versions rejected (a hard fork). Some (or one or a few) miners upgraded and started generating hard forked blocks and now we have to carry a new vote to correct this behavior so that Lightning Network transactions can function. ... Read More

I’ve recently released an alpha version of a ticket splitting matcher service on testnet. This post is meant to be a summary of the challenges of building a split ticket service and to serve as reference for their future development. Ticket Transaction (SStx) Layout Requirements A ticket purchase transaction (usually referred on decred’s source code as an SStx) must have a well defined layout, detailed in the IsSStx function1 : ... Read More