Friends in the crypto industry, you may have recently felt a familiar sense of confusion. Market liquidity has dried up, narratives are exhausted, and we are no longer interested in those once-exciting VC narratives and meme narratives. This state reminds me of 2019, when the crypto market was also in a state of overall confusion. Where do we go from here? Whenever the industry falls into crisis, like philosophers returning to Plato, we also need to return to Bitcoin, to the original intention of Satoshi Nakamoto.
In this context, Cipher, the founder of the RGB++ protocol in the CKB ecosystem, reflected on Ethereum's path dependency on 'on-chain computation' in a recent blog. He believes the crypto industry should return to the essence of P2P economics, letting computation return off-chain and validation back on-chain. This idea is directly reflected in CKB's Bitcoin programmability expansion solution - CFN (Fiber Network).
I - CFN: An Innovative Solution Paying Tribute to Bitcoin
CFN is the next-generation public Lightning Network composed of CKB and off-chain channels. Technically, it is not a simple replication of Bitcoin's Lightning Network but introduces several key new features based on CKB's Turing-complete smart contracts.
Multi-asset support: CFN is no longer limited to a single currency and supports multi-asset cross-chain trading, paving the way for complex cross-chain financial applications.
Programmability: CFN is based on CKB's Turing-complete smart contracts, supporting more complex conditional execution and business logic, giving the system higher flexibility.
Cross-chain interoperability: CFN's native design supports interaction with Lightning Networks of other UTXO chains (such as BTC) to achieve cross-chain atomic swaps.
Flexible state management: CFN achieves more efficient channel state management through CKB's Cell model and reserves space for future upgrades to more advanced payment channel technologies (such as PTLC).
These innovative features give CFN a more forward-looking technological evolution, especially its technical isomorphism with the Bitcoin Lightning Network (such as the same hash algorithm and time-lock scripts), providing a solid foundation for achieving cross-chain atomic swaps.
II - Application Scenarios of CFN
CFN is not just a CKB version of the Lightning Network, but a Bitcoin ecosystem programmability expansion solution of global significance. The potential application scenarios of CFN are broad and far-reaching, centered around the three major business models of the crypto industry - asset issuance, lending, and trading:
Cross-chain liquidity mining: Users providing cross-chain liquidity for assets supported by CFN can earn rewards, stimulating the issuance and trading of new assets.
Atomic cross-chain lending: Users can lock assets on the BTC network and borrow stablecoins of equivalent value on the CKB network, without trusting a third party, with full on-chain verification.
Cross-chain DEX: Utilizing CFN, a decentralized exchange can be built to support rapid, low-cost trading of BTC, CKB, and various RGB++ assets.
Through these scenarios, CFN not only grants Bitcoin's ecosystem Ethereum-level functionality and Lightning Network-level speed but also maintains Bitcoin-level security. This technological combination is highly competitive and is expected to stand out in the infrastructure competition of BTCFi in the future.
III - Outlook and Expectations
CFN has currently entered the testnet phase. We can observe its future development through the following key indicators:
The timing of successful interoperability with the BTC Lightning Network.
The growth curve of cross-chain trading 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.
