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Frederick Munawa is a Technology Reporter for Coindesk. He covers blockchain protocols with a specific focus on bitcoin and bitcoin-adjacent networks.
Bitcoin gaming and payments company ZEBEDEE announced the launch of its "No Big Deal" (NBD) nonprofit organization that aims to advance open-source Bitcoin development.
NBD comes out of the gate with several projects that deal with "hosted channels" on the Lightning Network, a layer 2 network that helps make bitcoin transactions faster and cheaper. Hosted channels are network connections that don’t require users to pony up bitcoins before making Lightning transactions.
The NBD initiative will allow other Bitcoin developers to build their own software instead of relying on third-party, for-profit services, such as ZEBEDEE itself.
"NBD does not sell anything, it does not offer services, it does not support products. It just writes code and gives it to the world to do with it as they will," said Andre Neves, co-founder and chief technology officer of ZEBEDEE, in a press release provided to CoinDesk.
First wave of projects
NBD's first four projects deal with hosted channels. Over time, the organization's open-source development efforts will branch out to include other aspects of Bitcoin. The four projects are:
- Open Bitcoin Wallet (OBW) is an advanced bitcoin Lightning wallet with support for hosted channels. It's noncustodial, meaning users controls their own keys and therefore control their own bitcoins. Those three key features (Lightning compatibility, support for hosted channels and being non-custodial) are what make it different from other wallets, the company said.
- Poncho is a plugin that allows Lightning nodes (computers on the Lightning Network) to run and serve hosted channels for Lightning-compatible wallets. Poncho is a Core Lightning (CLN) software implementation, meaning Poncho is designed with specifications outlined in CLN.
- Cliche is software program that lets developers create Lightning nodes with built-in support for hosted channels.
- Immortan allows wallet developers to add Lightning features to their wallets in a "plug-and-play" fashion. The project is a software library, or a collection of programming tools, similar to the popular Lightning Development Kit (LDK).
"We basically created an entire suite of tools for the modern sovereign individual, from the client you’d use to set up a node, to the wallet you’d use to manage your funds in a self-sovereign way," said Neves. "Anyone can now take any of what we’ve built and use it themselves, or completely transform it and create products of their own."
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Frederick Munawa is a Technology Reporter for Coindesk. He covers blockchain protocols with a specific focus on bitcoin and bitcoin-adjacent networks.
Frederick Munawa is a Technology Reporter for Coindesk. He covers blockchain protocols with a specific focus on bitcoin and bitcoin-adjacent networks.
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