Lightning Labs Raises $70M to ‘Bitcoinize the Dollar’

Lightning Labs, a bitcoin developer, announced a $70 million Series B investment round on Tuesday, as well as the debut of Taro, a protocol aimed to increase the global reach of bitcoin and Lightning by turning it into a multi-asset network that brings stablecoin to bitcoin. “Taro helps bitcoin in numerous ways, including onboarding people to bitcoin through fiat where they can easily swap between assets,” Lightning Labs Founder and CEO Elizabeth Stark wrote on the company’s Medium page. https://twitter.com/coingecko/status/1511580152416768009 This is particularly important during periods of high inflation when people all across the world are seeing their currencies depreciate in value. Taro can assist in these instances by facilitating fiat to bitcoin rails. “Further, as Taro uses bitcoin liquidity to route assets issued on the protocol, there will be greater demand for bitcoin on the Lightning Network,” Stark wrote. “As a result, bitcoin will route dollars, fiat, and everything in between. This is how we bitcoinize the dollar.” Lightning, a new protocol that pegs bitcoin as the “internet’s native digital money and system for value transmission,” would transit assets like stablecoins through the bitcoin monetary network, according to Stark. Taro uses Taproot, the most recent bitcoin upgrade, for “a new tree structure that allows developers to embed arbitrary asset metadata within an existing output” and Schnorr signatures for...