Socratic Seminar 17
2026-01-15
Housekeeping
- Questions are encouraged, including basic ones!
- Socratic Seminars are held under the Chatham House Rule: share the information you receive, but do not reveal the identity of who said it.
- For the privacy of other attendees, please refrain from taking photographs of other people without their permission.
- Socratic seminars are best when the moderator can let the conversation flow, so try to keep things concrete and focused.
- The reading list covers December 8th to January 15th.
News
- Clarity Act (H.R. 3633)
- A Mathematical Theory of Payment Channel Networks
- Lightning Year in Review Stats
- Stablecoins: Evolution, not a Revolution
- Distributed Charge Public Testing
- Time2Build 2025 Winners: Breez Awards Bitcoin Prizes for Lightning Integrations in BTCPay Server, Primal, and More
- BitGo Adds Support for Lightning Network from Custody
- Tether Leads $8M Strategic Investment in Speed to Advance Lightning-Native, Stablecoin-Powered Payments
- LQWD Delivers Record Bitcoin Lightning Network Volumes as Transaction Activity Accelerates
- REEZ.io Upgrades Bitcoin Payments With Lightning Network Integration
- Travel Retail Norway starts accepting Bitcoin at Oslo Airport via Lightning Network
- Bitcoin Capacity on Lightning hits an All Time High — 5,637 BTC!
Delving Bitcoin
Releases
bLIPs & BOLTs
- Lightning Specification Meeting 2026/01/12
- Lightning Specification Meeting 2025/12/15
- bolt12: Add test vector for missing offer_amount with offer_currency
- bolt11: Clarify that n is not mandatory
- bLIP-51: Specify invalid token error code
- Update bLIP-51 to add BOLT-12 support
Noteworthy PRs
Core Lightning
- doc: Update docs to reflect new hsm secret format
- Askrene: fix infinite cost assertion
- Modern node hsm_secret fixes
- recovery for modern nodes
- xpay: payment description
- lightningd: add description field to offer related responces
- lightningd: fix segfault when parse_filter fails
- Fix gossipd node announcement ordering
- Refactor LSPS plugin into proto/core/cln_adapters layers
- lightningd: fix db constraint error when fixing up old blocks.
eclair
- Rework channel lifecyle events
- Stop storing channel errors in
AuditDb - Dont rebroadcast announcements for spent channels
- Add
maxCltvExpiryDeltaparameter tofindRoute*APIs - Use fallback feerates on testnets
- Validate Bolt 11 fallback addresses
- Improvements and fixes for #3217
- fixup! Add API methods to spend funds sent to taproot channel addresses (#3220)
- Allow remote
dust_limit_satoshisup to 5000 sats - Dont scan the blockchain for spent external channels
- Identify failing node
- Unwatch previous funding tx after splice
- Accountable HTLCs
LDK
- Parallelize
ChannelMonitorloading from asyncKVStores - Default to padding blinded paths
- Reconstruct ChannelManager forwarded HTLCs maps from Channels
- Avoid force-closing 0-conf channels when funding is reorgd
- Set and relay experimental accountable signal
- Automatically archive resolved
ChannelMonitors in the BP - Fix double-forward, prefer legacy forward maps
- Remove circular reference in
GossipVerifier - Add a trivial helper to LSPS5s
WebhookNotification - Remove spurious debug assertion added in 0.2
- Refactor unified_qr.rs to use bitcoin-payment-instructions
- Insert channel funding outputs into Wallet
- Parallelize
read_payments - Parallelize init further
- Add structured logging context fields to LogRecord
lnd
- multi: add BuildOnion, SendOnion, and TrackOnion RPCs
- htlcswitch: add InitAttempt for idempotent external dispatch
- lnwire+tlv+route: enforce TLV length validation and add tests
- Aux Closer: Move coop-close aux finalization to chain watcher
- estimatefee: tx fee estimate for selected inputs
- graph: fix inefficient query for IsPublicNode
- [g175:3] graph/db: continue prepping
modelsfor V2 data - Enhance Lsp Heuristic when probing a payment
- multi: add
CombinedNoncefunctionality to Musig2 Signers - Always add the payment address when probing an invoice
- channeldb: fix race condition in link node pruning
- lnwire: enforce non-zero timestamp in gossip messages
- discovery: add panic recovery for gossip message processing
- rpcserver: use protocol max for fundMax, not maxChanSize