What Are Taproot Assets?

Taproot Assets is an open protocol developed by Lightning Labs that enables native asset issuance on the Bitcoin blockchain. Assets like stablecoins can be deposited into Taproot Asset Channels which are functionally equivalent to Lightning payment channels, enabling instant, low-cost asset payments fully secured by Bitcoin.

Taproot Assets are fully interoperable with the existing liquidity of the Lightning Network. Taproot Asset-aware Lightning nodes called Edge Nodes provide in-flight asset conversions to route the desired unit of value from sender to receiver. In this way, the Lightning Network becomes an open, global, multi-asset routing network for payments.