In this conversation, Stephan Livera discusses the RGB protocol with Anant and Federico, exploring its significance in the Bitcoin ecosystem. They explore how RGB enables smart contracts on Bitcoin, the role of stablecoins, user experience, and the efficiency of transactions. 

The discussion also covers the process of creating and managing assets on RGB, comparisons with other Bitcoin protocols, and the future of the RGB ecosystem. The importance of user adoption and the potential for real-world asset integration, while addressing risks associated with asset issuers is also discussed. 

Takeaways:

🔸RGB allows for smart contracts on Bitcoin without side chains.

🔸Stablecoins like USDT are crucial for Bitcoin’s ecosystem.

🔸User experience is key for adoption of RGB assets.

🔸RGB transactions are efficient and scalable compared to other protocols.

🔸Creating assets on RGB is a straightforward process.

🔸RGB offers a peer-to-peer solution without trust trade-offs.

🔸The RGB ecosystem includes various wallets and applications.

🔸RGB is more efficient than Liquid and Taproot assets.

🔸User adoption will depend on the value provided by RGB solutions.

🔸The future of RGB looks promising with potential for real-world asset integration.

Timestamps:

(00:00) – Intro

(00:55) – What is RGB?; RGB’s functionality and updates

(04:25) – Why do we need non-bitcoin assets?

(07:45) – What does RGB look like for the end user?; UX of using RGB Tether 

(09:50) – RGB Lightning

(12:09) – What is it like building an RGB wallet?

(16:54) – How does one create and transfer an RGB asset?

(19:36) – Efficiency of RGB compared to other protocols

(23:04) – Is RGB only for stablecoins?; Scope of having Real World Assets on RGB

(27:39) – Overview of the RGB ecosystem 

(29:48) – RGB vs. other Bitcoin solutions (Taproot assets, Liquid, Spark etc.)

(34:25) – Sponsors

(35:23) – Will there be RGB payment processors in the future?

(41:15) – How does RGB compare with altcoins (other Layer 1s)?

(43:06) – Risks and Trust in asset issuance

(48:24) – Why should users care?; Market fit and adoption

(52:40) – Closing thoughts  

Links: 

• https://x.com/anant_tap 
• https://x.com/FedericoTenga 
• https://rgb.info/ 
• https://x.com/RGB_Hub 
• https://x.com/bitcointribe_
  https://x.com/BitcoinTribe_/status/1975061808584302987 

Sponsor:

• CoinKite.com (code LIVERA)

Stephan Livera links:

• Follow me on X: @stephanlivera
• Subscribe to the podcast
• Subscribe to Substack

Transcript:

Stephan Livera (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about RGB and some of the new stuff happening there. So rejoining me on the show is Anant, listeners you might know him from Keeper, but this time he’s also joining to talk from a Bitcoin tribe product lead perspective. And of course, long time listeners you know Federico as well. Federico is head of R &D over at Bitfinex and of course very involved in what’s going on with RGB. So… ⁓

Yeah guys, first of all, welcome back.

Federico Tenga (00:33)
Thank you for having us.

Anant (00:34)
Thanks for having us, Stephen.

Stephan Livera (00:37)
Yeah,

so I guess what spurred this was, as I know, there’s been some updates in the world of RGB. I guess, very, I guess super quick overview for people who aren’t really familiar. RGB is this way of doing, let’s say, smart contracting in Bitcoin, but it’s not like, you know, a side chain or it’s kind of like on top of Bitcoin, we’re going to get into kind of the detail a little bit of how that works. And the other way I’m understanding it is

you can do assets on top of RGB. right in kind of crypto and shitcoin land, it’s really popular now to talk about RWA, real world assets. And so I guess this is kind of one way to do that in Bitcoin. And of course the other big news is Tether, and I guess Federico can obviously touch on this, working with Bitfinex Tether on Tether coming to RGB. So I guess that’s kind of, in my mind, that’s a bit of the overview, but can you guys give us your take on this in terms of the new updates with RGB?

Federico Tenga (01:36)
Maybe should I go first? like, yeah, okay. Yeah, so like, yeah, I have to be like in just in a words, it’s like this protocol for tokenization on top of Bitcoin that has also a little bit of smart contract capabilities. But being on top of Bitcoin and on top of Bitcoin, we mean like really on top of Bitcoin, not with some like side chain or like a federation or some like something that introduce trust trade-offs. So directly on top of Bitcoin.

Stephan Livera (01:38)
Yeah, yeah, go on, Federico.

Anant (01:40)
Go on.

I’ll be adding all this ⁓

Federico Tenga (02:06)
and is also compatible with ⁓ any Bitcoin scalability solution, such as, yeah, nowadays, Lightning Network is the only one that is truly working in production. So, RGB is compatible with Lightning Network, but is in principle compatible also with other scalability solutions, such as ARK or Stagechain or anything that may come in the future. So, it’s a way to, yeah, have asset tokenization on top of Bitcoin, and then, yeah, later on, we can also…

Anant (02:07)
Okay, cut.

Federico Tenga (02:34)
look at the use cases and what we are excited about regarding this.

Stephan Livera (02:38)
Yeah, and Anant, an update on your side.

Anant (02:41)
So, you see RGB and the reason we have been like ⁓ focusing really hard on RGB is because ⁓ like Frederico said, RGB is essentially the SATs that we use to transition Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain. ⁓ We have these UTXOs which are nothing but the envelopes that carry SATs, right? In normal terms, that is what I tell when a new team member joins us how ⁓ explain RGB.

And we are using these envelopes for additional purposes. So basically, RGB is doing more with Bitcoin without changing anything on Bitcoin. So everything lives off chain, the issuance, the transfers, the validation, everything lives off chain. But essentially, at the end of it, you write a hash on that particular envelope and send it across. So that is essentially what RGB is. RGB has gone.

live on mainnet. That is the big update and that is one of the reasons we have been talking about it. Like you mentioned, USDT has reaffirmed their commitment towards RGB. We have done a small pilot with a test token called USDT, which went very well, which is like on the mainnet. So that was tested, you know, by a lot of people across the world. So yeah, that is basically and a lot of new products and features are like

coming up in the ecosystem in the RGB landscape. So that’s essentially a brief update for you.

Stephan Livera (04:17)
Yeah, okay. And look, I guess, you know, obvious question that most people will want to ask. They’ll be like, why aren’t we all Bitcoin maxis? Why do we even need non-Bitcoin assets? How would you guys answer that question?

Federico Tenga (04:29)
think there are two answers. One is that there are some people that are also interested in other assets, but they still want to leverage all the guarantees that Bitcoin has to offer in terms of security, trustliness, but also scalability thanks to the Latin Network and other scalability solutions. also, personally, the use case I’m most excited about is the stablecoin use case with USDT.

And in the end, Bitcoin is the biggest ⁓ asset in crypto industry. But still, people that want to Bitcoin against USDT in ⁓ DEX setup, they end up using like a rough Bitcoin, like a centralized version of Bitcoin that is really not ideal. mean, nobody want to, if people could avoid it, they would like to avoid it. So there have been all this attempt to bring Bitcoin to other chain with this centralized rough Bitcoin.

Anant (05:25)
Thank you

Federico Tenga (05:29)
But it’s much easier to bring it makes much more sense to bring us the T to Bitcoin because you sitting so anyway already a centralized asset with a centralized issuer. So then people can trade us the T directly against the native Bitcoin or potentially also other assets against Bitcoin, but against real Bitcoin, not against some rough version of Bitcoin. So this.

Stephan Livera (05:47)
Gotcha. I see. And so as I’m

understanding in like crypto land, I’m not as familiar with that land. I mean, maybe you guys are a little more closer to that, or at least least understanding what they’re doing there. But they’ve got things like they might have some staking pool thing or something where they want to put some asset in and borrow against that and get stablecoin against that. And for that reason, that’s why, like you said, they might be using wrapped Bitcoin or something like this now. And potentially, yes, we are seeing some of this kind of thing in

Federico Tenga (05:53)
Thank you.

Stephan Livera (06:17)
you know, Bitcoin land as well, like Bitcoin collateralized lending startups, as an example. ⁓ And I guess some forms of asset trading inside of Bitcoin land. But I guess the idea is RGB is going to allow more forms of that to happen in Bitcoin, as opposed to people having to go into altcoin ⁓ ecosystems for those things.

Federico Tenga (06:39)
Yeah, listen,

I mean, also Bitcoin, as a Bitcoin, most Bitcoin maximalists in the end, they still may need to manage their exposure against with the US dollar. So yeah, we all want to be 99%. First of all, not everyone is so aggressive to be 99 % allocated, but even if you want to be 99 % allocated to Bitcoin, you still have that 1 % that you need to manage a bit. either you do it through like, well, either you do it directly to cash, which is, but yeah, it’s not always the best way.

Anant (06:49)
Hey.

Federico Tenga (07:08)
not for everyone is the best way. Or you do it through like a KYC exchange. Or if you want to do it like in a decentralized manner. Yeah, nowadays you need to go to Alcoin, to shitcoins that you may not want to touch. You may not even know like you don’t want to go through Metamask and deal with all of the stuff. So if you can have it naturally on Bitcoin, it’s also great for Bitcoin maximalists that yeah, knows that the dollar will go to zero eventually, but you still need to have a bit of dollar exposure right now. So it’s great tool also for.

pure Bitcoin maximalist people.

Stephan Livera (07:39)
Yeah. And let’s just talk through just because, you know, a lot of listeners may not have played around with RGB themselves. Can you just walk through like, what does it actually look like for the end user? Right? Like if I’m just an everyday, let’s say I’m Bitcoin guy, but I want some tether, I want some RGB tether. What does it look like? Is it just like an app and I send and receive using RGB tether? Well, like, can you just walk me through just to give listeners a sense of what that looks like?

Anant (08:06)
Yeah, so ⁓ it’s very important to understand that one of the first thing is because RGB is built on the Bitcoin blockchain, Sats are essentially the fuel for your assets. So anything it’s like if you want to send or receive an issue, you can do all that, but you are using underlying Sats for like a gas, ⁓ like fuel for the thing.

Stephan Livera (08:32)
So I have to do an on-chain transfer.

Let’s say I want to do an on-chain transfer. So let’s say I want to receive some RGB tether from you. Do I show you an address and then you send some tether to me using RGB and it’s an on-chain transfer to achieve that or talk me through that.

Anant (08:44)
Correct. Pretty

much, pretty much, pretty much. So, basically once you have some SATs ⁓ you can you know you can do these transactions, but the way these transactions work is as you would do in any other situation. I will come to the part where we introduce lightning and we make it more efficient, but if you just consider normal on chain one you show me an invoice I send RGB on a token on it and asset on it and you receive it that is it. There is a bit of interaction.

but that is all handled behind the scene for a sender and receiver you show a QR code I scan the QR I send it you receive it that’s it. So it is an on chain transaction when you are not using lightning but when you are using lightning let’s come to that part when you are using lightning you don’t even have to commit it on chain you can have that UTX for the envelope that I was talking about where you are going to write the asset anchor you can keep it

off chain all the time unless you actually close the channel or commit it on chain. So that’s how it works.

Stephan Livera (09:50)
I see.

And so in the RGB lightning context then, presume we get similar guarantees like in lighting. It’s ⁓ instant payment and lower fees. Is that the main kind of thing we’re dealing with there when we’re talking about RGB lightning? Or what’s the difference?

Federico Tenga (10:04)
Yeah, mean, it’s

same trade-off that you have normally with Latin. The only difference is that the channel is denominated in RGB asset instead of being denominated in Bitcoin. But for UX point of view and security point of view, it’s all the same.

Stephan Livera (10:18)
Okay, so just to be clear then, when we do an RGB lightning channel, it’s asset specific. So let’s say it’s a tether RGB lightning channel. Let’s say I open that lightning channel with you, Federico. Now we can transfer back and forth RGB tether over that RGB lightning channel. That’s how it would work. Okay, and then I presume you’re gonna have some kind of swap provider, maybe this is where like the Collider Swap example is useful because…

Anant (10:19)
Absolutely.

Federico Tenga (10:33)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, correct.

Stephan Livera (10:45)
many everyday users like the end user, he doesn’t really want to do all the channel management, whatever. I presume you’re going to have like swaps in the background. So then the end user can just have like a simple app experience, but actually in the background, there’s swaps going on. Is that roughly what’s happening or can you explain?

Federico Tenga (11:02)
Yeah, that also the exact user experience depends also on a little bit of the application developers, how they want to offer it to their users. But yeah, having swaps on the fly is definitely ⁓ an option. ⁓ Or you can just have what you have with already a lot of lighting walls that they take care of managing your ⁓ channel liquidity also for UST or whichever asset that you want to use and have a channel denominated.

Anant (11:11)
Thank

Federico Tenga (11:30)
denominated in, like a network of channels denominated in that specific RGB asset. So I mean there are trade-offs involved, rather like if you want to, if it’s easier to boost trap enough liquidity for that specific asset or to have like swaps on the fly. So I think for popular assets like USET, it makes more sense to just have like an entire lighting network, boost trap light channel liquidity in denominating that asset.

Anant (11:57)
Yeah.

Federico Tenga (11:57)
For less popular assets, swaps ⁓ on the fly is a better solution. But that’s something more for app developers than protocol-related constraints.

Stephan Livera (12:07)
Gotcha.

And then speaking of developers, let’s hear from your perspective, Anand, because you’re building Tribe, a Bitcoin Tribe, which is an RGB wallet. Can you talk us through your approach there? What has it been like for you building an RGB wallet? And just explain a bit about that for us.

Anant (12:10)
So.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure. ⁓ like Federico was explaining, the Lightning Network itself has a liquidity of that particular asset, right? So for example, if I’m sending you USDT, I don’t actually, and you are okay to receive in USDT, I don’t actually need to do a swap because underlying it’s SATs, but the SATs are carrying the same USDT, which you will get and you will just, you’re happy to receive USDT. So that’s a given.

many of the transfers happen that way. Now if you want to abstract it further you can introduce swaps where I’m saying I’m actually going to send you a Swiss franc stablecoin and you want to receive USDT that is when the swap might come into picture or you want to onboard yourself with first like swapping sats for USDT and then using it or let’s say there are Apple shares on top of top of RGB then

Stephan Livera (13:08)
Gotcha. Okay.

Anant (13:23)
swap might come into picture where you are swapping USDT for RGB asset that vertical RGB asset and then you are receiving. So, swap may not necessarily come into picture for when you are sending and receiving if you want both one the same asset let us say USDT, but otherwise swap is a good corollary function to have around in the ecosystem and that is the way we are approaching it in Tribe. Tribe currently focuses on really developing the core of RGB.

So if you use tribe you would realize that we have really abstracted the know the SATS concept completely away. So yes you can see your SATS balance but you do not have to worry about it and recently we even launched something called a witness script which what that means is that you can get started with RGB even if you do not have SATS. So let us say you know you have downloaded tribe wallet and you want to start receiving something. So there is something called witness script where I can send you let us say five

dollars and you can receive it without having SATs. So, ⁓ we are focusing on those core concepts where a single asset or a single ⁓ know transfer can happen with least amount of friction and with most effective use of SATs. Once that is done transitioning it to lightning would be super easy and if you look at the you know players in the RGB ecosystem actually everyone is trying to cover different niches.

so that you you have a holistic solution and yes at the end of it you should just be able to send and receive any asset to anyone anywhere basically.

Stephan Livera (14:55)
I see.

Yeah, and I guess fees are low right now on chain. So I guess for now people are just gonna start on chain because it’s cheap, right?

Federico Tenga (15:06)
Thank

Anant (15:12)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Federico Tenga (15:12)
Yeah, mean like,

I think like, yeah, don’t know, that’s like the same situation that you have with Bitcoin, rather like, if it won’t use Bitcoin on chain or on Lightning. But I think that there are use cases of using RGB on Lightning also, not only because of this fees, but also because of the lower latencies. And that’s particularly interesting when you do threading on Lightning. So once you have USDT on Lightning or like any other popular asset, you can do atomic swaps.

between UST and Bitcoin. And this can be used either in the payment use case, as we just described, but also for the trading use case, the people that want to trade. And for trading to have short-term finality is quite important. I mean, you don’t want to do a trade that then hangs there for 30 minutes because it’s waiting for confirmation. So it’s not a fee problem, but it’s also like ⁓ a latency on the settlement problem.

Anant (15:58)
you

Federico Tenga (16:11)
And that lighting is perfect because you can have instant finality of the trade. mean, as instant as lighting can be of the trade. And you can enable some sort of almost high frequency. High frequency usually is used for nanoseconds, but you can go as low as a millisecond with lighting if you have a direct channel with the counterparty and there is no problem or you very good routing in principle.

Anant (16:15)
air in the stream.

Stephan Livera (16:40)
Yeah,

Federico Tenga (16:41)
So, yeah.

Stephan Livera (16:41)
I see. So I guess that’s like a business model there for someone that if they want to set up like an RGB exchange where people can trade in and out quickly, that maybe maybe that’s like a business model there. ⁓ And yeah, so maybe if you could, if you guys could just talk us through what it looks like when you want to create an RGB asset and transfer that asset and then delete that asset, like what does it look like for someone who wants to, you know, make an asset in RGB?

Federico Tenga (16:53)
Yeah.

Anant (17:02)
It’s a big move.

and we to see and we will continue to do.

Yes, so first step really in RGB is obviously to issue an asset. We call it issuing an asset which is basically creating an asset. And in RGB, it’s a peer-to-peer system. Anyone can create an asset. The short form of it is that creating an asset is defining an asset. What is that asset? Putting it in a specific schema that has been defined and then keeping it off chain and putting the hash of it on one of the UTSs. So you do not have to.

disclose anything about the asset its value how many they are none of it so you have the as far as the bitcoin blockchain goes it doesn’t know anything about the asset it just knows that a single one-time UTXO has been used for something which is like a normal transaction but when I send it to you Stephan ⁓ or any other receiver that is basically the second step I send it to you so when I send it to you you can

I also have to send you the details of that asset. So I send you UTX on chain, but basically ⁓ you apparently I’ll also have to send you what is that asset and every detail about it. Now you can completely verify it off chain, do all the looking up and verifying. Okay, I was supposed to receive five USDT. Is it five USDT and everything, everything is in line or not. can verify it and then you can check on chain that, okay, what this guy is saying.

actually he has committed to it he actually has 10 USDT and he sending me 5 of them. So, that is how sending receiving and verification on the receiver side works it is actually pretty simple just the key point here is again that it is completely client side. So, I send a particular transaction to your address or your UTXO and then I send you separately that by the way this is the contract whose hash is committed on that UTXO. So, that is why.

you know it is a bit more sophisticated on the client side on the wallet development side ⁓ but for the user it is pretty straightforward.

Stephan Livera (19:17)
I see. And then I guess the other interesting thing is that it’s very, it’s more chain efficient in a way, right? Compared to like, you know, kind of shit coin land, but like BRC 20 people were getting really annoyed. And, I viewed that as spam because it was like just spam in the UTXO set. Whereas this is like a very, it’s a different kind of asset protocol where, as you said, it’s client side validated. It’s a different paradigm. Um, so can you explain a little bit like, what does it look like on chain and

you know, from an asset perspective, what does it look like?

Federico Tenga (19:50)
⁓ So the way RGB works is that basically it uses ⁓ off-chain data ⁓ to assign assets to Bitcoin or TIXOs. There is a Bitcoin TIXO, it contains some SaaS, and we say, okay, now it doesn’t only contain SaaS, but it also contains some assets. And when you want to move this to a new TIXO, you basically create a transaction that is spending that TIXO, so you are proving that you are the legitimate owner of the asset, and then you create a new…

Anant (19:52)
Thanks.

Federico Tenga (20:18)
message to say, this assets that were in UTXO A from now on will be in UTXO B. This message is hashed, to simplify hashed and committed inside the same transaction. this is can like RGB supports two commitment method. One is through operator and one is through TAPRUT commitments. So the trade off is operator is a bit like it is a

simpler on the implementation side for Wally developers and also it doesn’t risk overlapping with other meta protocols on top of ⁓ Taproot that may emerge in the future. ⁓ While Taproot is even more efficient because the commitment, you don’t even have the Operator component, it’s just inside the Taproot ⁓ output itself. So from the on-chain perspective, you either have this extra 40 bytes with the Operator.

Anant (20:52)
Thank you. ⁓

Federico Tenga (21:13)
or have this extra zero bytes with a top-load commitment. ⁓ But it’s very compressed because then this 40 bytes can also be the commitment for several transfer that we’re going out of that UTXO or that group of UTXO if you are having multiple inputs. So batching.

Stephan Livera (21:29)
That’s interesting. So just just so I understand you there

you’re saying one RGB one on chain transfer can actually relate to multiple RGB asset transfers. That’s the point you’re saying

Federico Tenga (21:39)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I

can either pay out hundreds of thousands of people at the same time. That can be the use case of an exchange in operating withdrawals, stuff like that. Or I can even aggregate multiple inputs for for operating payments, protocols, or transfer different assets at the same time. The thing is like each transaction will have only one

commitment and that this commitment is actually a merkle tree that commits to all the different individual RGB transfers that are happening.

Anant (22:11)
you

Stephan Livera (22:17)
I see. Yeah, so it is way, way more efficient in that way. Yeah.

Federico Tenga (22:19)
So yeah, it’s

slightly more efficient for the simple case of one-to-one transfer, but it’s massively more efficient for transfer that are paying to multiple people and that are more complex.

Anant (22:27)
Excellent.

Stephan Livera (22:35)
I see. So I guess as an example then if you’re doing like some kind of RGB decks or something like this, when you’re doing a payout, you could be doing like one on-chain transaction that relates to like, you know, thousands of payouts, right?

Federico Tenga (22:46)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah. So yeah, like the scalability on the batch inside is basically, yeah, you have this fixed amount of byte and then whatever you are doing with the transfer, it can all go there. the scalability is very, good.

Anant (22:47)
Yeah, that’s good.

Stephan Livera (23:04)
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, it’s interesting just to kind of understand the different paradigms of like, okay, yeah, like the efficiency side of it. ⁓ Okay, now in terms of uses, as we, I think most of our discussion here has been around, let’s say stable coins, I guess you’ve touched on, ⁓ in some cases, maybe people want to do tokenized equity, or maybe tokenized debt could be examples in the future. ⁓ So are you seeing this as mainly at least

for now, is it mainly a stable coin story? Like is that the main reason you see or what you’re interested in? But maybe other people are interested in other things. Maybe you guys just can comment on that. I guess the question is, is it mostly a stable coin story with RGB?

Anant (23:46)
I would put it, stablecoin is huge. ⁓ Any digital token asset in the crypto space is basically Bitcoin or essentially stablecoin. So stablecoin is huge and stablecoin is obviously going to be big part of what RGB is. But theoretically, if you take a step back, you could have any real world asset and stablecoin is a huge example within that and it’s a proven example.

ever growing example so it’s like the big thing but you can have any asset we you know within the team we play around with it we issue some simple memorabilia and trinkets and you can you can pretty much do anything see the point is that bitcoin is like the valuable asset we all know but there is value outside of bitcoin as well which are

call for lack of a better term real world assets basically there is equity in company I like the equity in my company I might like gold I might like something else now these values exist outside of the Bitcoin space what RGB or some other such protocols are trying to do is how do we use the already existing this train network this network of you know sending and receiving and wallets and custody how do we use this

powerful network for value that is all that also sits outside of Bitcoin. So, in theory you could have gold, you could have you know equities bonds like you said, but we know that you know stablecoin is a proven story. So, it is going to be a big part of the RGB story as well that is the way I see it, but no one is stopping some people have already issued like you know some means and digital stuff that they play around with it like.

Federico Tenga (25:29)
Yes.

Anant (25:38)
It’s completely peer to peer, so RGB, there’s nothing to stop anyone from playing it.

Federico Tenga (25:46)
Yeah, I in the end, the proven product market fit in this industry, like, you have, of course, Bitcoin, that is from where everything started. Yep, stable coins that have been proven to have a product market fit. And then you have all this casino, shitcoin, mincoin, whatever. Those are the three things that have product market fit. I’m not so interested into shitcoin, mincoins, even if some people will do that.

Anant (25:58)
Got it.

Federico Tenga (26:13)
I think yes, stablecoin on Bitcoin is going to be very powerful. yeah, real world assets, I mean, if they take off, of course, it’s better to have them on Bitcoin rather than other chains. But I think they still need to prove themselves to be something that the market really values. think a lot of people are talking about it, but we’re still not seeing it at a significant scale.

So if they actually become a big thing, of course, they can leverage RTV as well. But yeah, personally, we are more excited on the stablecoin use case. Also because it can be great for Bitcoin itself, because stablecoins on Lightning can bring more volume to Lighting, both through payment in UST, but also through trading, because trading volume can be massive compared to payment volumes. Once we have volumes on Lightning, means that like

Anant (27:05)
It speaks to people.

Federico Tenga (27:11)
People that are working on lighting, they start to collect better fees, so to make more money. More money means that they can build better products, so better lighting for everyone, also for the people that only care about Bitcoin, they don’t care about stablecoin by themselves. So think this can be the catalyst for the flywheel to make lighting truly take off. Then yeah, more lighting is also used, the liquid is provided to to collect yield. ⁓

Anant (27:17)
Thank you.

Yes.

Federico Tenga (27:41)
I’m very excited about this, not just for the RGB side but also for ⁓ lighting in general.

Anant (27:43)
the one time of the climate’s really been

mixed where I’m getting a strike.

Stephan Livera (27:46)
Gotcha. Can you

talk to us a little bit about the RGB ecosystem right now? I understand, obviously, it’s not just you guys, there are other wallets and other apps out there. Can you give us just a bit of an overview? What are some of, at least today, as we speak, October 2025, who are some of the big other players or software or parts of the RGB ecosystem, just for people who want to get an overview?

Federico Tenga (28:11)
Yeah, well, maybe I can just mention a few of them. I I hope I’m not going to offend anyone that I will fail to mention. But yeah, like, ⁓ Tribe is, I think, the most popular RGB wallet. mean, ⁓ they really like to work to build a very, good RGB wallet for mobile. ⁓ Then on our side of Midfenix, we released the Iris wallet.

Anant (28:16)
in the intensive care unit. That’s the V-Pay program.

Have a great

Federico Tenga (28:38)
which is also like a mobile wallet. But basically in the background, it’s running the same library as Stripe. So the difference between the two is mostly on the front-end side. They did a much better work in building a good UX for sure. Then there is Kaledo’s op that

Anant (28:43)
you

I

must add that it was also because a lot of the heavy lifting was done by you guys.

Federico Tenga (29:08)
Then, like, Kaledo Swap is working on the Dex. It’s this Dex product on top of Lighting. Then, Thunderstack is a voltage-like product to help integration with RGB and RGB Lighting. And Bitmask is also building his RGB wallet, but this is more browser-based.

Anant (29:08)
Yes, sir.

Federico Tenga (29:34)
Then there are a other worlds that are more focused on the Asian market. yeah, for sure, I forgot. LFI is an exchange that integrates with RGB. there are many others also that are in the background of integrating RGB, as we speak. ⁓

Anant (29:35)
Thank you.

cousin car

Stephan Livera (29:55)
Gotcha. Okay. ⁓ So now let’s talk a little bit about RGB in comparison with other now, I guess the way I’m understanding it is there’s let’s say competition from let’s say inside the family of Bitcoin world. Like you’ve got things like liquid and you’ve got things like tapered assets kind of in inside of Bitcoin or Bitcoin adjacent world. And then you’ve got like, you know, shitcoin world where, you know, some of these whatever they’re they’re doing their own change. They’re doing their own whatever L2s and this and this and that. Can you just give people an overview at least how you understand it?

Federico Tenga (30:05)
⁓ huh.

Stephan Livera (30:24)
How does RGB compare to some of these other ways of doing RWA and assets? Like at least maybe starting, let’s say in the family or in the Bitcoin family, RGB compared with let’s say liquid or tapered assets. How would you compare?

Anant (30:40)
So I can start off and for the code please do add So so you have clearly you know very well described the problem statement basically there is the Bitcoin space and other space so clearly Bitcoin is The most secure chain and very well anchored and all that so it trumps You know RWAs are stable coins issued on other chains, right? Yeah, they have network effect, but hopefully not for long. So now we come to the Bitcoin space and

Like you said, there is liquid, there is taproot acids, there is spark. There are good solutions, there are decent solutions with different trade-offs. We believe that RGB has a fully matured RGB has way more, way better trade-offs as compared to most of the other chain. Liquid, for example, is more federated than beer to beer, right? You do have to trust a federation and liquid itself.

in terms of how they deploy liquid and all that. ⁓ When it comes to taproot assets, a very close competitor, very similar structure, but they do, as far as I understand, they do need centralized indexers because ⁓ some of their state is global and ⁓ that is why there are some benefits of it, but then there is the centralization around indexers, wherein RGB is completely peer-to-peer. ⁓

So there are differences and from an efficiency point of view, we know that, know, how many number of assets or transfers you want to do, it really doesn’t matter. It’s just like one hash or a hash of a markup route, right? So it is way more efficient and it is net positive for Bitcoin and for the user, it’s quite private and quite sovereign. So that’s how I look at RGB in comparison to…

other options available out there.

Stephan Livera (32:37)
Federico?

Federico Tenga (32:38)
Yeah, I agree. In the end, most of the alternatives, they introduce trade-offs, either through federation or through other kind of trust trade-off, like with staging, etc. And they can be valid trade-off for some users, maybe they the right trade-off, but they don’t allow you to fully leverage, to use it without introducing extra trust assumption, compared to the simple one that you have on Bitcoin, that there is a…

no miners that control all the network. So I think this is very powerful for RGB that it positions itself like, know, you have the spectrum between you want to maximize security or you want to maximize efficiency. And when you’re somewhere in between, it’s hard to differentiate yourself from the one right, left, like right on the left side or on the right side on the spectrum. So it’s also harder to…

like on the social scalability side to get some good network effect and so long term to convince the users to stick around long term. So RGB puts itself to the maximizing security like no extra trust assumption compared to Bitcoin. If you are good with the Bitcoin trust assumption, RGB doesn’t add anything else. The one that is closer to it is for sure Taproot Asset because the design is very, very similar.

Anant (33:57)
Any, yeah.

Federico Tenga (34:03)
But still, would say RGB has a few advantages in terms of privacy and in terms of ability to do batching. So it has a few advantages in there. And then, yeah, of course, there are implementation differences. So people may prefer one implementation compared to the other. But the trade-off there is more similar. the difference is more on the implementation and distribution side.

Anant (34:12)
Thank

Stephan Livera (34:30)
Yeah.

And just while we’re here, before we move on to the other comparisons, I read and as I understand it, I mean, you guys tell me if I’m missing something or how you see it, but as an example, in the Taproot Assets concept, the idea is they’re leveraging the already existing Lightning network and then they may have some kind of Lightning swap provider who’s like a special swap provider at the end who’s helping do a swap function for the user. But the idea is the end user

Anant (34:34)
.

Stephan Livera (34:59)
just sees a Lightning invoice and he just pays a Lightning invoice and then actually at the end of the day, the merchant gets paid. Let’s say that merchant wants to receive Taproot Assets Tether as an example, right? That’s an example of that gets facilitated that way. If I think about that in like a liquid context, that might be like, know, Bolts.Exchange is providing the swap in the background so that the end user can kind of, so maybe the end user who’s paying, he can pay with Lightning or something else.

Anant (35:16)
Thanks.

Stephan Livera (35:26)
and then the merchant can receive what he wants. Maybe he wants liquid Tether or whatever, liquid Bitcoin, and he can later swap that into Tether if he wants. So how would that work in an RGB context? Do you see that there will be RGB payment processes or something similar to a Boltz.exchange ⁓ who helps facilitate that? Is that a ColliderSwap thing? Maybe just walk me through that just so I understand if you’re a merchant who wants to use RGB Tether, what does it look like?

Anant (35:31)
Thank

.

Federico Tenga (35:56)
Yes, those are differences that are not related to the protocol itself, but more how the first implementation decided to work on it. I had a few discussions with the Lighting Labs team regarding this. I don’t think the model that they proposed, which is not a constraints of the protocol, it’s just the way they decided to implement it, it can work that well at scale because if the fact that you need to swap…

Anant (36:01)
near.

Federico Tenga (36:23)
twice on the fly for every payment to leverage Bitcoin liquidity instead of strapping the asset specific liquidity. It sounds good in theory, but in practice it means that every time you do a payment, you need to negotiate two swaps, so two exchange rates with two providers in different parts of the network. ⁓ You need to pay twice the spread, and this adds a lot of latency, a lot of risk of failure of the payments, and potentially a lot of cost. ⁓

Anant (36:26)
you

Thank

Federico Tenga (36:53)
I think it’s a better model to have channels denominated in that asset because then you don’t have all of this complexity and all of this extra cost. Of course, it’s a bit more painful because you need to boost up liquidity in this asset. But in general, lighting is going to work well for popular assets. If an asset is not popular enough to boost up channel liquidity, probably also the exchange rate of the swap provider is not going to be the best. So it’s also not going to be great experience anyway.

Anant (37:08)
Thank you.

you

Stephan Livera (37:20)
Interesting.

Federico Tenga (37:22)
So these are not things related to the protocol. Both RGB and TAPRT asset could work with both models. So it’s more related to the implementation. The way they decided to approach it, I don’t feel is the best. But yeah, maybe I will be proven wrong.

Anant (37:30)
Yeah ⁓

Stephan Livera (37:39)
Yeah, and aren’t anything to add on your side there.

Anant (37:39)
No, I think that’s that’s that’s really the implementation difference Here it’s asset specific asset focused. So yes, you need liquidity of that particular asset, but but we have seen that you know There are asset which have huge network effects and you really don’t really have to switch it around

And we’ve also seen that, you know, changing the asset twice, even if let’s say I want to send USDT, you want to receive USDT, you will still have two swaps. That’s like almost unnecessary, right? So for most of the people who are going to probably, let’s say 70 percent, I’m being conservative, but 70 percent of people would just probably trade in USDT. The swaps are completely unnecessary, right? Yeah, for 30 percent of people.

Stephan Livera (38:21)
I see. So then maybe they end up paying extra swap

fees and maybe it’s less efficient that way. I mean, who knows, right? I’m speculating. I don’t know. ⁓ But yeah, it’s interesting to see.

Anant (38:25)
See you.

It’s costly, it’s costlier,

it is less efficient and it will fail more often. You might not find a swap partner, you might not have the right swap connection at the right time. So I completely feel that asset specific liquidity is a harder initial problem. But once it is there, then there is no other moving. There are very less moving parts.

Stephan Livera (38:50)
I see. So you see it more like it’s kind of it’s harder to get

that snowball rolling down the hill or the flywheel example, but once it’s rolling, then it’s a bit easier to like kind of keep that asset network growing and using it. And I guess you are also leverage. Obviously, Tether is the biggest is the world’s biggest stable coin with a lot of like hundreds of millions of users. So I guess you’re trying to tap into that market of hundreds of millions of users who might want you might want to do it this way, maybe.

Anant (39:02)
Absolutely,

just your SDT. So, see one of the sorry just last thing I wanted to complete is see one of the things is that asset issuers want their assets to succeed. So, they would like to provide the infrastructure and liquidity of that particular asset and they would like you know bootstrap that piece. Now once that is bootstrapped, the basically the friction is more on the issuer side than the user side.

Federico Tenga (39:17)
Amen.

Anant (39:45)
That is one way to look at it.

Stephan Livera (39:48)
I see, yeah. Federico, anything you wanted to add there?

Federico Tenga (39:49)
I think assets

that are not that popular, yeah, like I think we will end up with the issuer being like this app node that everyone connects to and they can go through that. Asset that are more popular like USDT, they will have a more healthy, more distributed network. mean, potentially USDT, like I said, there are more people doing payments with USDT than with Bitcoin right now. I I hope it will change in the future, but this is situation right now. So potentially we may even end up that…

For a period of time, we have a Latin network that is bigger on USDT than it is on Bitcoin. So yeah, why try to leverage Bitcoin liquidity when you can create a new liquidity?

Stephan Livera (40:29)
Gotcha. Okay, so we’ve spoken a bit about RGB compared, you know, in the family of Bitcoin, let’s say now if we compare RGB with kind of shitcoin land, right, like Ethereum, Solana and Tron, because that’s what a lot of people are using nowadays for stable coin transfers or for some other forms of RWA. How does RGB compare with those?

Federico Tenga (40:50)
Yeah, it’s like how Bitcoin compares to those. So you have all the differences that you have between Bitcoin and those other layer ones, security, decentralization, reliability of the network, long-term sustainability. You have all of these reasons why Bitcoin is a better layer one to build on rather than these others. And then, I would like that the other thing that we already mentioned is that

Anant (40:51)
Thanks

Federico Tenga (41:20)
With RGB, you have native Bitcoin, have the real Bitcoin that you can swap with, work with. With the others, you need to deal with this centralized Bitcoin. think that’s a very appealing reason to use RGB rather than these others. Plus, you don’t need to deal with their native token. Plus, can leverage the Lightning Network that can perform better than some of the…

Anant (41:37)
you

Federico Tenga (41:50)
some of these layer ones in some cases.

Stephan Livera (41:52)
Interesting. So I’m reading it there

as mainly not having to wrap right so as an example WBTC Which is like I think Justin Sun and bit go and stuff like that like that’s basically a wrapped form of Bitcoin that exists on I think Ethereum and maybe tron or I don’t know whatever But the point is people are wrapping their Bitcoin to use it on some of these shit coin layers Whereas in RGB world, it’s just like you’re just already using Bitcoin. So you don’t need to kind of wrap it So I guess that’s the interesting comparison there ⁓ now one other angle

Federico Tenga (41:59)
Yeah. Yeah.

Anant (42:06)
you ⁓

Federico Tenga (42:07)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

Stephan Livera (42:21)
And this could be a line of criticism that I’ve seen amongst some, let’s say more developer and technical types in the Bitcoin world. Their criticism has been, ⁓ but what if other large assets come to live, quote unquote, on Bitcoin, right? Whether that’s RGB or Tapered assets or something else. And could that mean the asset issuer could come to influence Bitcoin soft forks and Bitcoin contentious changes? I guess theoretically the idea would be, okay, what if the government goes to Tether and says, hey, Mr. Tether, you need to go with our chosen fork.

Anant (42:35)
I’ll see you next time. ⁓

Thank you.

you

Stephan Livera (42:51)
this kind of thing. Do you see that as a risk? Or is it just like a matter of how big the asset gets? Or Bitcoin remains decentralized anyway? Do you see that as a risk or no? What do you think?

Anant (42:52)
Thank

So actually this segues very well from the previous point you mentioned and one of the things we touched on the previous point is that there is some kind of a smart contract that has been put on the chain to be able to deal with it. In RGB there is no smart contract on chain, there is no management of smart contract. Obviously you rely on the issuer but other than the issuer you do not have to rely

on the credibility or the continuity of the smart contracting there. So obviously the trust assumptions are very clear. You trust the issuer, yes, that’s it. That’s the only trust you have and everything is peer to peer. I send it to you, I trust you, you have to trust me. So if you carry that line of thinking forward into this question where it is about ⁓ what if there’s a big asset that is used on RGB? Does it impact?

the forking or reorganization or rollbacks of Bitcoin. think theoretically it is possible but number one the asset will have to be super big to really ⁓ incentivize the miners to roll back the whole thing, to roll back blocks. They can’t just choose a particular transaction and take it out because they do not have the private keys. They can’t do anything about it. While in case of

smart contracts they might do something with the smart contracts right. The other thing is in case of RGB when you see a transaction you cannot make out on the Bitcoin blockchain that this is an RGB transaction it has an asset so it will which are you which block which transaction are you going to roll back which block are you going to roll back and what are you going to do so it will need way more coordination you will have to actually you know collude with the sender

figure out which one it is then put in enough money to roll it back and then still make sure that you know someone else does not go forward to it. So, unless it is like a probably a multi million dollar asset on a single transaction there is absolutely no incentive theoretically it is possible, but there will be very less incentive for that and yeah that is that is how I will put it.

Federico Tenga (45:17)
Yeah, are like two angles to this. One is the incentive for like, let’s say you have this massive like USDT transactions and then there is an incentive for the miners maybe to like roll back some transaction if there is enough bribing from the other side. But that is the same problem that you have already with the big Bitcoin transaction. If I make like a Bitcoin transaction that is moving one million dollars of Bitcoin, it’s already a…

many multiples of the money rewards. So there is already there are big incentive for bribe in the market, the miner to try to reorder the chain. So it doesn’t really introduce a new ⁓ vector of attack and new vulnerabilities. It’s already the same dynamic with Bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin transaction can already have multiple down the value of the money reward.

Yeah, that’s some dynamic that is already a state that is solved by waiting for more confirmations. So I don’t think it changed anything that while on the idea that, yeah, the government like us, it is very popular on Bitcoin. Everyone is using it and the government goes to tell us, OK, now you need to use my KC fork of Bitcoin and that agrees. OK, so what? OK, that will move to the KC fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is keep using the Bitcoin blockchain.

Anant (46:30)
Yeah. ⁓

Federico Tenga (46:39)
Which one is

bigger? cares? mean, like the important thing is that Bitcoin as it is intended to work keeps being able to serve the user. Then if there is another like KYC fork of Bitcoin that is used for USDT, who cares? I mean, it’s there. You don’t need to use it if you only care about Bitcoin.

Anant (46:48)
Now. ⁓

Yeah. That’s…

Stephan Livera (46:59)
Yeah, okay. And

so, uh, did you have a final comment there, Anant?

Anant (47:04)
No, no, I’m saying that’s a very good way to put it, Fadriko, because what we are saying is that there is no additional trust or additional attract vector that RGB is introducing into Bitcoin and that’s actually very, very important to underscore. So everything that RGB is doing is trying to keep it completely off chain, no additional trust requirements, no additional attack vector it introduces either to Bitcoin or users. That’s essentially why.

RGB is much more powerful and you know kind of it doesn’t really impact Bitcoin. It is only net positive for Bitcoin if anything.

Stephan Livera (47:39)
Yeah,

yeah. So I think I’m with you guys on that on the decentralization side of things. ⁓ Maybe the challenge then is just how do you get users, right? Like just getting product market fit, right? So where do you guys see that coming from? ⁓ You know, if you know, because it might be a case where, know, RGB is more secure and more decentralized, but users maybe don’t care, you know, so what’s what’s going to make users care and make users decide, yeah, I want to use RGB tether or RGB tribe, RGB.

Federico Tenga (48:01)
Yes.

Stephan Livera (48:08)
⁓ to do ⁓ operations whether that’s your RWA or stablecoin stuff. What do you guys think?

Anant (48:09)
in.

To be honest users wouldn’t care users wouldn’t come to a solution or they wouldn’t come to try because it’s RGB To be honest, they would want a faster more reliable and cheaper more effective solution so So no one comes for you know, because it is this particular technology I’m to use it right if they come for what they are getting out of it and that is what you know people

in the product team like ours are trying to solve without telling users because we are good and we are Bitcoin and we are RGB that is why you use us maybe 10 people will use you only like people who want to try it out but when you want really you know mass adoption then that you have to provide real value so RGB we have established here on this concept RGB does have real value in terms of security in terms of efficiency everything now it is our job

of how those benefits of RGB get translated to the benefits that the user gets without user having to worry about if it is RGB. It should be cheaper, it should be faster, it should always be available, right? If we can crack these three, which are the kind of forms that we need to translate it and get to the users. And that is what essentially we are working on. When they find a solution where they see, ⁓ initially probably USDT might have.

was an Omni, but it was very difficult, it did move on and then it did move on. So, if we are able to provide a way better solution and there is a lot of community support for it, then we believe that reduction should come with it.

Federico Tenga (49:51)
I think like, yeah, as I say, the adoption doesn’t come from the technology, but comes from good products being built. So like the builders are going to create adoption, not like the protocol being amazing and being good tech. But I think like, so then the question is, how can RGB attract builders? I think, there are all these benefits of the tech that we just discussed, but there’s also the fact that, I mean, people don’t like to ⁓ bring their users to someone else’s playground.

And all other layers, all other solution that introduces trust trade-off, they’re always someone else’s because there is someone that boosts traffic that layer one that created the chain that is benefiting from the token going up, the layer one token going up, or that is controlling the chain. Surg B position itself as this neutral playground where you can go there. You are just under Bitcoin rules. You are not under someone else’s rules.

And so it was on the social scalability side. So you don’t need to introduce trust or having a good business relationship to the party that is managing the total chain or the total solution. So this is something that can attract a big use case, big liquidity, and then in the end, good builders. And in the end, it can create the network effect to have a…

Anant (51:09)
Thank you.

Federico Tenga (51:18)
good adoption for a good experience for all the users.

Stephan Livera (51:22)
Excellent. Yeah, I think it’s a, think it’s a interesting, just to see the comp, the competition and kind of what is, let’s say, what are the unique things about RGB? So as I’m reading it, as I’m understanding it, it’s like this idea. Okay. So again, the client side validated paradigm, it’s a different paradigm, but that allows certain things in terms of maybe low fees, easiness of use. And that may attract, like you said, Frederico, certain builders to the ecosystem, which into who build.

Anant (51:33)
Thanks.

Stephan Livera (51:52)
certain products and then obviously those products are what hopefully appeals to the end users who want to actually use the wallets and the swaps services and the decentralized exchanges and so on. ⁓ I guess we’ll leave it there. Any last comment and where people, where can people find you online and learn more about either what you’re building or just RGB in general.

Federico Tenga (52:13)
must say guys, people can find me on Twitter, just my name, Fadi Gotengas. It’s very easy to find me. And to learn more about RGB, there is this website that a lot of people are contributing to maintain. It’s called RGBinfo, where you can find access to all the information about educational, but also developers tools and various resources. So yeah, I recommend people to go to RGB.info to learn more about RGB.

Anant (52:29)
⁓

So yeah, you can definitely find me on on X anand underscore tap But more importantly I would request you to like download Bitcoin tribe just search Bitcoin tribe in your app stores or follow up with going tribe on X and You know use it see the power of RGB give us feedback

and that’s how you can get involved and get in touch.

Stephan Livera (53:02)
Fantastic. All right,

well, we’ll leave it there. Federico and Anant, thank you for joining me today.

Anant (53:08)
Thanks, everyone.