The Confusion and Return of the Encryption Industry

The current encryption industry is in a state of overall confusion similar to that of 2019. Market liquidity has dried up, and the narratives seem to be fading. Whether it's the VC narrative or the anti-VC Meme narrative, neither can capture the market's interest anymore.

In this case, we need to return to the original intentions of Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto. As stated by a certain protocol founder, the encryption industry needs to reflect on the path dependency of Ethereum's "on-chain computation" and return to P2P economics, allowing computation to be done off-chain while verification is completed on-chain.

In the selection of Bitcoin programmability expansion solutions, CKB respects the consensus of the Bitcoin community "verification over computation." They did not replicate Ethereum's Rollup solution and Restaking+AVS solution, but instead paid tribute to the Bitcoin Lightning Network by launching the CKB version of the Lightning Network, Fiber Network (referred to as CFN).

CFN is the next-generation public lightning network built on CKB and off-chain channels. Its technology stack mainly includes CKB's Cell (a Turing-complete UTXO), RGB++'s isomorphic binding, Leap's bridge-less cross-chain, Bitcoin's HTLC (Hash Time Lock Contract), and the state channels of the lightning network.

The standard payment channel lifecycle of CFN includes: opening the channel, locking assets, creating HTLC, updating status, validating transactions, completing transactions, closing the channel, and submitting the final state. Similar to the Bitcoin Lightning Network, CFN's channels can remain active for a long time, forming an off-chain asset payment/clearing network through a "multi-hop" mechanism.

However, the CFN is not a complete replica of the Lightning Network. It has the following key new features:

1. Multi-asset support: No longer limited to a single currency, paving the way for complex cross-chain financial applications.
2. Programmability: Turing-complete smart contracts based on CKB support more complex conditional execution and business logic.
3. Cross-chain interoperability: Native design supports interaction with other UTXO chains' Lightning Network.
4. More flexible state management: Thanks to the CKB's Cell model, CFN can manage channel states more efficiently.

It is worth noting that CFN has reserved space for future upgrades to more advanced payment channel technologies (such as PTLC), and this forward-looking design gives it a competitive edge in technological evolution.

Due to the technical isomorphism between CFN and the Bitcoin Lightning Network, there is a natural foundation for achieving cross-chain atomic swaps between the two. This swap is not limited to the native assets of the BTC and CKB chains, but also supports RGB++ assets, Taproot assets, and more.

CFN provides a fast and low-cost transfer channel for RGB++ assets, while RGB++ offers a rich variety of asset types for CFN. The combination of the two enables a powerful synergy of "Bitcoin-level security + Ethereum-level functionality + Lightning Network-level speed."

The potential application scenarios of CFN revolve around the three major business models of the encryption industry (asset issuance, lending, trading):

1. Cross-chain liquidity mining
2. Atomic Cross-Chain Lending
3. Cross-Chain DEX

If these scenarios are ultimately realized, the Bitcoin ecosystem can leverage CFN's cross-chain atomic swap capability to achieve native stablecoins, native lending, native DEX, and other DeFi applications. Therefore, CFN is not just a CKB version of the Lightning Network, but a globally significant programmability expansion solution within the Bitcoin ecosystem.

CFN is about to launch its testnet. We can observe its future development through the following indicators:

• The point in time when successful interoperability with the BTC Lightning Network is achieved.
• The growth curve of cross-chain transaction volume after the mainnet launch
• The number and quality of cross-chain DApps developed based on CFN
• The adoption level of RGB++ assets on CFN

Among the many Bitcoin programmability expansion solutions, CFN stands out. It chooses to return to the classic paradigm of the Bitcoin Lightning Network and innovates upon it, thereby possessing the strong consensus of Bitcoin's native characteristics and extremely high scalability. This gives CFN the potential to stand out in the future infrastructure competition of BTCFi.