The Code for an Anonymous Lightning Network is Now Live

That's according to Dr. Ayo Akinyele, a computer scientist who has focused his efforts on building a zcash implementation of anonymous off-chain payment architecture called BOLT. And today that work was published on Github.

First conceived by zcash founders Matthew Green and Ian Miers in 2016, the code is inspired by the bitcoin scaling solution, lightning network, and seeks to unlock high levels of transaction throughput while adding payment confidentiality.

"The lightning network has solved the initial issue with scalability, and now that gives us the opportunity to deal with the privacy problem. That is the strength of the BOLT design," Akinyele told CoinDesk.

Going forward, the team behind BOLT is hoping to follow a similar development plan to the lightning network itself - deploying it as an open testnet to allow users to battletest the software.

"It would be awesome to deploy this, similar to what lightning had done, and allow people to test on the testnet and then gradually get toward the mainnet," Akinyele said.

Such additions would be applied to the lightning network itself, as an option for users looking to anonymize their payment channel usage.

If lightning settles in what is termed a "Hub-and-spoke" structure, there's a risk that nodes with high processing throughput can have an overview of transactions as they run through the network.

While lightning also employs a technique called onion-routing, in which users can route payments through many different channels to hide the contents of a payment, Akinyele warned that the practice might not catch on.

Specifically, Akinyele said the design owes a lot to the popularity of the lightning network payment channels being used today, which are beginning to reveal what the network could look like.

"Having lightning exist and being used has been very helpful in figuring out how to do privacy correctly," he told CoinDesk.