Lightning Labs Launches Renamed ‘Taro’ Amid Bitcoin’s BRC-20 Bottleneck

Bitcoin (BTC) users have been given a potentially more efficient way to store new assets on the blockchain after an updated edition of the recently rebranded Taproot Assets Protocol was released by Lightning Labs.

In a May 16 blog post, Lightning Network infrastructure company Lighting Labs criticized the current methods by which assets are enrolled on the Bitcoin blockchain, calling them “extremely efficient” and pointing to cumbersome protocols that write asset metadata “directly into the block space.”

Today we are pleased to announce the latest version of Taproot Assets, a scalable protocol for issuance of assets #bitcoin and Lightning.

With this release, developers have key features to Bitcoinize the dollar in a chain-efficient way! ⛓️

— Lightning Labs⚡️ (@lightning) May 16, 2023

The Taproot Assets Protocol was designed to work “maximally off-chain” to avoid the network congestion that has become an unfortunate feature of the Bitcoin network since the introduction of the BRC-20 token standard by the anonymous developer “Domo” on August 8 March. .

Lightning Labs said protocol users will soon be able to integrate BRC-20 assets into the Lightning network, with wallets, exchanges and merchants transitioned instead of having to “boot a new ecosystem from scratch.”

Domo has previously said that the Taproot Assets Protocol is a much “better solution” for minting new assets on Bitcoin compared to pre-existing methods such as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), as it allows users to easily transition to the Lightning network for “fast and cheap transactions.”

The vast majority of BRC-20 tokens created to date use ordinal inscriptions of JSON data to deploy, mint, and transfer token contracts.

This method has received a lot of criticism from developers who claim that the process costs four times the transaction costs than using binary alone.

The Taproot Assets Protocol is the renamed version of the original “Taro” protocol. Lightning Labs was forced to change the name of the software after what it called a “frivolous” trademark infringement lawsuit filed against them on December 8 last year by blockchain development company Tari Labs.

Related: Ordinals and BRC-20 will disappear within months, JAN3 CEO says

The total value of BRC-20 tokens briefly crossed the $1 billion mark on May 9, but has since shrunk back to $500 million, a drop of nearly 50%.

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