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  3. Published Social post

    Common Knowledge Base Association (CKBA) (@ckba_build)

    While Fiber and Lightning are two separate payment channel networks, we figured there doesn’t need to be a hard boundary between them. Fiber’s Cross-Chain Hub can connect the two and let payments move atomically across both networks. Here’s how it works 👇 A hub operator runs a node on Fiber and a node on Lightning, maintaining liquidity on both sides. If you want to pay a Lightning invoice from Fiber, you send a conditional payment to the hub. The hub then uses its own BTC liquidity to pay the recipient over Lightning. The same process works in reverse for payments coming from Lightning into Fiber. Crucially, these are not two unrelated payments. Both sides are tied to the same payment hash. Lightning uses an HTLC, while Fiber uses its own time-locked contract. When the recipient claims the outgoing payment, they reveal a secret preimage that also allows the hub to claim the incoming payment. So the hub can’t simply take your payment and fail to settle the other side. Its ability to collect is cryptographically linked to successful settlement of the outgoing payment. If the payment never completes, the timelocks provide a recovery path for the locked funds. Currently, the Cross-Chain Hub supports one configured pairing: a wrapped-BTC token on Fiber ↔ BTC on Lightning. Support for native CKB and other user-defined tokens is in the works :) 👉 https://www.fiber.world/

  4. Published Social post

    Common Knowledge Base Association (CKBA) (@ckba_build)

    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

  6. Published Social post

    Common Knowledge Base Association (CKBA) (@ckba_build)

    You may have noticed that Crypto Twitter has spent much of this week arguing about whether AI could break the cryptography most crypto wallets rely on. You may also have struggled to follow the elliptic curves, ECDSA, lattice-based commitments and P = NP stuff. That makes you completely normal. Fear not: nothing has been broken, as far as anyone knows. Here is what happened, what is still unknown, and why it matters. On Tuesday, OpenAI released 722 mathematical manuscripts, written by an internal model it has not made public, covering hundreds of open problems. Mathematicians are still working out what they represent. Fewer than half have computer-checked main results, and a computer check confirms the logic, not the significance. Three papers were withdrawn within a day over a sign error. OpenAI has not claimed an attack on wallet cryptography. One result nevertheless drew serious attention: claimed progress toward the Riemann hypothesis, a puzzle about prime numbers unsolved since 1859. Rutgers mathematician @AlexKontorovich said that if a human had done it, it would be "an instant Fields Medal, no questions asked." The crypto world noticed. On Wednesday, Ethereum Foundation researcher @drakefjustin asked the industry to "calmly begin planning for bunker mode": preparing for the elliptic-curve signatures protecting most Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets to be broken by ordinary mathematics before quantum computers can do it. His worst case: "months not years." @VitalikButerin took the concern seriously but cautioned: "don't rush anything." He advised favoring hash-based schemes where possible, adding: "I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined." In three bullets, the central idea: ⦿ Your wallet has a private key you keep secret and a corresponding public key ⦿ A signature made with the private key authorizes a payment; anyone can check it against the public key ⦿ The security rests on one-way math: easy to go forward, believed practically impossible to reverse on today's computers, so nobody can realistically work out your private key from your public key Nobody has proved that last step cannot be reversed; it has resisted every known attempt on today's computers. The worry is that AI might find a shortcut. There is a precedent for mathematical shortcuts: decades of work made factoring large numbers far easier than the obvious method suggested. Vitalik asks whether elliptic curves, and the newer lattice-based schemes built to resist quantum computers, hide shortcuts humans have missed but machines might find. Not everyone is convinced. Coinbase's head of cryptography, @LindellYehuda, says there is "no evidence whatsoever" that the assumptions behind elliptic curves have been weakened, and called the warning FUD. Nobody claims a breakthrough has happened; the dispute is over how seriously to prepare for one. However you weigh the risks, there are two clocks running. One is a quantum computer powerful enough to break this cryptography. It doesn't exist yet, and its development involves engineering milestones we can track. The other is a hypothetical mathematical breakthrough, which could arrive without notice and run on machines already available. Nobody can confidently date either. What would be at risk if an attacker could recover private keys from public keys? The most immediately exposed funds would be those controlled by keys that are already public. On Bitcoin, many address types hide the public key until you spend, and good wallets send change to a fresh address. On Ethereum, people commonly keep using one address, and its public key can be recovered as soon as it signs a transaction or a message. Bitcoin also has exposed keys in older outputs, Taproot outputs and reused addresses. That distinction explains Drake's advice to move funds to fresh addresses that keep their public keys hidden behind a hash. A new address is not automatically safe, though: Taproot outputs, for example, include a public key from the start. Sensible preparation starts with the ability to change. A blockchain may need to swap how it checks ownership as confidence in existing methods shifts, ideally without a network-wide upgrade. That is what crypto-agility means: engineering for flexibility. On CKB, ownership checks are programs, so new ones can be added without changing the network's rules. A signature scheme built from hash functions, the family Vitalik advises favoring where possible, is already live on mainnet: SPHINCS+. Our Chief Architect, Jan Xie, covers the quantum timeline and the challenges of migration in notes from a recent talk: https://jan.la/posts/pqc-migration-talk-notes/

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