Products

The Association develops and manages standards, registries, libraries, nodes, command-line tools and technical documentation

Standards

The association maintains so-called LNPBP standards: specifications, standards & best practices for Layer 2, 3 solutions (and above) in cases when they do not require soft- or hard-forks on the Bitcoin blockchain level and are not directly related to issues covered in Lightning Network RFCs (BOLTs).

Basically, LNPBPs cover everything that can be anchored to Bitcoin transactions, defines primitives for L2+ solution design and describes complex use cases which can be built from some primitives. This allows such solutions as financial assets, storage, messaging, computing and different forms of secondary markets leveraging Bitcoin security model and Bitcoin as a method of payment/medium of exchange.

Criteria for a LNPBP standard proposal:

• Should not be covered by existing or proposed BIPs

• Should not cause soft- or hard-fork in Bitcoin blockchain (but may depend on soft-forks from an existing BIP proposals)

• Should not distort Bitcoin miner's economic incentives

• Should not pollute Bitcoin blockchain with unnecessary non-transaction related data or have to maintain such pollution as low as possible

• Must not require a utility or security tokens to function (but may enable creation of digital assets or tokenized physical goods)

• Must not depend on non-bitcoin blockchains (but may be applicable to other blockchains)

The current list of standard can be found on a dedicated website or in GitHub repository here. You can use GitHub discussions to:

• submit a new standard proposal

• discuss preliminary ideas about new standards

• follow announcements about standard releases

• write about your implementation of one of the standards

• ask questions

• peer review & audit existing standards

Libraries

Libraries maintained by the Association can be classified into the following categories:

1. Consensus libraries

2. Standard library

3. Node-related libraries

4. Application-level libraries

The dependencies between these groups are strongly abstracted into four layers, such that underlying group doesn’t know anything about the libraries from the layer above.

Consensus libraries

These libraries are a part of the ossified client-side-validation consensus and must not be modified except of bugfixing. Usually, consensus-level libraries are named with “Core“ or “Foundation” as a part of their name.

1. Client-side-validation foundation library

2. Bitcoin common libraries: implementation of parsing bitcoin data related to bitcoin consensus layer. Currently, there are split in two groups:

   1. Rust bitcoin ecosystem, maintained by Rust bitcoin community (mostly Blockstream members and Andrew Poelstra)

   2. BP Foundation Libraries, maintained by LNP/BP Standards Association, Bitcoin Protocol Working Group. Contain re-implementation or improvements of the rust-bitcoin libraries

3. Bitcoin client-side-validation, also called “BP Core Lib”. It provides primitives such as deterministic bitcoin commitments (“TapRet”, ”OpRet”) and single-use-seals.

Repo (crate)	GitHub Org	Description
client_side_validation	LNP-BP	Abstract client-side-validation
bp-consensus	BP-WG	Bitcoin primitives (alternative to rust-bitcoin)
bp-core	BP-WG	Client-side-validation for bitcoin protocol
rgb-core	RGB-WG	RGB consensus library

Standard libraries

Standard libraries provide high-level convenience API for working with bitcoin, lightning & RGB, and do not perform any consensus-level tasks. Any validation and consensus operations must perform without standard libraries.

Repo (crate)	GitHub Org	Description
psbt	BP-WG	Implementation of partially-signed bitcoin transactions and operations with them involving signatures, support for client-side-validation etc
descriptors	BP-WG	Primitives for constructing wallets supporting bitcoin descriptors
invoices	LNP-BP	Implementation of universal LNP/BP invoices standard
lightning_encoding	LNP-WG	Encoding for BOLT data used in lightning network
lnp-core	LNP-WG	Implementation of both BOLT and LNPBP standards of lightning network
rgb-std	RGB-WG	Convenience API for working with RGB smart contracts

Nodes

RGB Node

Node performing client-side-verification of RGB smart contract and keeping the stash of all known contracts and their state. Provides API for the wallets and lightning node for accessing information about the contracts.

LNP Node

Lightning node implementation made in rust targeting developers. Has extensible architecture, supports plugins, AluVM scripting, Bifrost, Storm, RGB protocols out of the box.

BP Node

Indexes bitcoin blockchain and mempool, connecting to Bitcoin Core and bitcoin P2P network. Drop-in replacement for Electrum Server, providing modern & fast API supporting monitoring wallet descriptors.

Documentation

Document	Description	Audience	URL
RGB FAQ	Gives introduction into RGB from a power user perspective	Most broad	rgbfaq.com
Blackpaper ("whitepaper")	Systematically explains RGB, its capabilities and most important applications in half-technical terms	Most broad	blackpaper.rgb.tech
Blueprint ("specification")	Technical explanation of all RGB internals, more readable than standards	Schema developers, integrators	blueprint.rgb.tech
Code docs	Documentation for the RGB-related APIs	RGB maintainers	docs.rs/<crate_name>
LNP-BP Standards	Formal & complete standardization of RGB algorithms & consensus	Auditors, RGB maintainers	standards.lnp-bp.org
Yellow paper ("formalism")	Formal mathematical specification on RGB	Computer scientists, cryptographers	yellowpaper.rgb.tech
AluVM	Documentation on AluVM - functional virtual machine used in RGB consensus, node and lightning	AluVM contributors, auditors, application developers using AluVM	aluvm.org
Strict Encoding	Documentation on binary encoding used in RGB consensus	RGB schema (smart contract) developers; application developers using strict encoding	strict-encoding.org
Contractum docs	Documentation on Contrctum languague	RGB schema (smart contract) developers	contractum.org
RGB source code	Source code for RGB consensus, standard lib and node	RGB contributors	github.com/RGB-WG

Contributions to external projects

LNP/BP Association in 2019-2021 was a major contributor into @rust-bitcoin and other related project.