What is Fiber and Why Does It Matter? 👇
1/ What is Fiber
Fiber is a privacy-by-default, scalable network for fast, low-cost payments and swaps between digital assets. Aligned with Bitcoin’s principles, Fiber connects peers decentrally, ensuring security and efficiency without external consensus or centralized validation.
2/ What makes Fiber different?
- Beyond channel network like Lightning, Fiber natively supports stable-coin payment and assets swap, unlocking new Bitcoin-based financial use cases.
- Unlike sidechains and rollups, Fiber is not a chain. It scales off-chain with Bitcoin-aligned decentralization, privacy, and security, while achieving high efficiency without relying on external trust assumptions or complex cryptographic proofs.
3/ Why Fiber matters:
- Bitcoin-aligned: Expands Bitcoin’s use cases while staying rooted in its decentralization principles.
- Lightning-compatible: Works seamlessly with Lightning while adding flexibility and multi-asset support for payments & swaps.
- Privacy-by-default & Efficient: No network-wide consensus; transactions are only visible to involved parties and settle quickly via direct peer-to-peer communication.
4/ Features rundown:
- Multi-asset support: Supports stablecoins, RGB++ assets on the Bitcoin ledger, and UDT assets on CKB.
- Ultra-low fees: Micropayments as small as 0.0001 cents, with fees as low as 0.00000001 cents.
- Instant asset swaps: Swap any asset pair as long as a channel path is available.
- Cross-network payments & swaps: Seamless transactions between the Lightning Network and Fiber.
- Watchtower support: Helps node operators monitor and secure the network.
- Multi-hop payments: Run a Fiber node and earn fees by facilitating payments.
- Low latency: Transactions process with minimum delay (e.g., 20ms for 0.0001 cent payments).
- High throughput: Transactions handled by involved peers without requiring network-wide consensus.
- Enhanced privacy: Transactions are only visible to involved peers.
- Advanced cryptography: Uses PTLC instead of HTLC for stronger security and privacy.
- Composable with CKB Scripts: Integrates with other contracts and Scripts on CKB.