Common Knowledge Base Association (CKBA) (@ckba_build): If Lightning is fundamentally a BTC payment network, how do you make other assets move through it?

If Lightning is fundamentally a BTC payment network, how do you make other assets move through it? There are several different approaches. Taproot Assets, for example, keeps BTC liquidity at the center of the network. When a user wants to send a Taproot Asset across Lightning, the asset is exchanged for BTC at the edge of the network. The payment then travels through ordinary BTC Lightning channels before being exchanged into the desired asset at the receiving edge. That means most intermediate Lightning nodes can route the payment without ever needing to support or even recognize the Taproot Asset. RGB pushes multi-asset support deeper into the route. When a user wants to send an RGB asset across Lightning, that asset can travel through RGB-enabled channels from sender to receiver without being converted into BTC along the way. The trade-off is liquidity: every channel on the chosen route must already have enough of that specific RGB asset on the forwarding side to pass the payment to the next hop. If even one channel lacks sufficient liquidity, that route cannot complete the payment. Fiber starts from a third architecture. Because CKB already supports user-defined assets at the base layer, Fiber doesn’t need to add a separate asset protocol on top of a BTC-only settlement layer. Supported CKB assets can be locked directly into Fiber channels and routed natively through the network. These are three entirely different architectural approaches to the same problem, each with different trade-offs. Check our latest article to learn more about how each solution works 👇 https://www.nervos.org/knowledge-base/how_payment_channel_networks_support_multiple_assets