I was curious what this actually meant: from Ethereum to Bitcoin via Lightning. The article didn't really explain. Does it mean that someone had 1 USDT on Ethereum and ended up with an RGB allocation that was 1 USDT on RGB Lightning? If so, what does that mean?
I still don't understand RGB very well. Seems like you include some extra data in a extra taproot output or an op-return and then people who are running RGB will be able to use that data to validate transactions on their own machines.
On Lightning, it seems like your channel commitment transaction needs to also include some RGB data (in a taproot output or an op-return) and then you can send RGB assets back and forth via your lightning channel. I may be misunderstanding their docs here but it looks like a non-RGB participant lightning node could route RGB assets.
So, using this basic and possibly incorrect understanding, what I think happened is this:
- Someone had some USDT on Ethereum.
- They also had some extra eth in their wallet because you always get gas when you use a shitcoin.
- Then you send this USDT to a bridge (In my ignorance, I think of a bridge like a mixer. It's basically just some wallet that you send your money to and then they promise to send you the same amount to an address you provide on a different chain). In this case the bridge is called Tricorn.
- The bridge sends a bitcoin transaction with a special RGB output as a commitment transaction to a lightning channel.
- The someone from #1 hopefully controls this channel.
The article goes on to say:
LNFI will use the bridged USDT as a Lightning Service Provider (LSP) on Astra Labs, enabling “instant, private, cheap, trust-minimized stablecoin swaps between supported blockchains and the RGB Lightning Network.”
So the someone in #1 was LNFI (docs), and I don't really know what Astra Labs is doing here (their website was too awesome for my computer to load), but they say of themselves: "The convergence of AI Agents, Blockchains & Lightning Network."
So, what does all this mean? I think it means somebody managed to buy some USDT on Ethereum and now they have a Lightning channel on Bitcoin with an extra output that includes some RGB data which represents the USDT. Presumably LNFI controls the keys to the side of the lightning channel on which this RGB asset is currently sitting, or maybe they've sent the tether-RGB-asset-lightning-sat(s) to Astra Labs by now...