At Plan B, Alberto De Luigi tells us about Bitcoin’s new revolution, quietly underway .
At the Lugano forum we met Alberto De Luigi , who overwhelmed us with his enthusiasm, showing us from his smartphone a wallet accessible via the web. His thesis?
Bitcoin has finally reached its completed form.
Right now, and against all expectations, the big twist is coming in a sector that seemed to have dozed off a bit. Intrigued, we asked him a few questions.
Alberto, it’s a pleasure to see you again here in Lugano and with all this enthusiasm; it’s been quite a while since we’ve read an article of yours!
Hi everyone! True, I haven’t written in a while, but there are excellent reasons! On one hand, with AI the usefulness of my guides and articles is reduced. If back in 2016 blogs like mine were needed to keep up with innovations such as the Lightning Network, especially in Italian, today with a few targeted prompts anyone can reach the information they are looking for.
On the other hand, I’ve found it more exciting to build something concrete rather than be an opinion leader. I still enjoy writing a lot, but I have little time, since I’m completely absorbed by my project.
By “your project” do you mean the Bitcoin wallet you just showed us?
Well yes, that too. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, the final product for the user. As you saw, in the wallet the Bitcoin are sent instantly, with zero fees, and without the complications of channels or liquidity. In addition, to the same Bitcoin addresses, the wallet can receive or send other assets such as stablecoins.
A revolutionary Bitcoin wallet: Ark + Lightning
Hold on a second, Alberto… let us understand. First of all, if you’re talking about instant Bitcoin transactions, I imagine we’re dealing with a Lightning Network wallet. How does it manage channel liquidity, is it a custodial wallet?
No, of course not! Who do you take me for! (he laughs, ed.). The wallet is completely trustless , and in fact the transactions you saw don’t even travel on the Lightning Network, or almost never. It’s a perfect mix of different technologies: Ark and – when needed – Lightning, without Lightning’s typical complications for users.
And there’s also no peg-in or peg-out, no Bitcoin derivatives. Nothing that could make users lose money if hacked.
Can you explain in a few words how it works, without getting too technical?
Of course. Essentially, when you import your Bitcoin seed or send a first transaction to the wallet ( Sequentia web wallet , ed.) it automatically moves the funds into an aggregated output of many other users, called a “batch” according to the Ark protocol.
Within the batch, users can pay or receive instantly and for free, while to and from the outside of the batch, funds are moved via the Lightning Network, generally to another Ark batch or any Lightning node.
Lightning is therefore used only to route payments externally, and runs mostly between professional operators, while the average user uses almost exclusively Ark. Only for transactions worth thousands of dollars (but the limit is configurable) do you wait the typical 10 minutes for the next Bitcoin block. The difference from a typical Lightning wallet is that there is no longer any inbound/outbound liquidity problem for the average user: everyone receives and sends right away, free and instant.
It sounds a bit too good to be true. Are we sure it works?
Yes, it doesn’t sound real, but here we are! This is what we’ve always wanted for Bitcoin: scalability, speed, censorship resistance and inclusiveness, with an extremely simple user experience.
What you’re seeing now on sequentiatestnet.com/wallet has used Bitcoin testnet4 since July this year (after months of testing), but anyone could already compile from github.com/ConcatenaLabs to install it on mainnet. If you just want to try it though, testnet is preferable!
We’ve also integrated a faucet directly into the wallet, just one click, no installation or sign-up, and you can try it on the fly! We’re planning to launch it on Bitcoin with a proper awareness campaign in 2027, so that it can actually reach mass adoption.
Same Bitcoin seed and addresses, but for all assets
But in this wallet we also see assets other than Bitcoin? What’s behind this? Is it like having two wallets in one?
Yes, you can also receive other assets, but the seed is just one, as are the Bitcoin addresses: any wallet (Ark, Lightning, Onchain) can pay you to the same QR code, with any asset. Imagine having a Bitcoin wallet where you can also send and receive USDC, USDT, stock tokens and tokenized financial assets, and perform instant swaps (DEX). Muggles used to make fun of us saying that Bitcoin cannot scale enough to let everyone buy coffee.
Here, instead, not only do we allow everyone to buy coffee with peace of mind, but we even open the doors for trading Bitcoin with the whole financial system. And for transactions involving assets other than Bitcoin, the maximum onchain waiting time drops to 1 minute.
So sorry Alberto, there has to be something behind this that you haven’t told us yet. For onchain payments of assets, the Bitcoin blockchain is not used? Where does a 1-minute block frequency come from? Does the wallet rely on the Liquid network?
Again, the answer is no, it doesn’t rely on Liquid: the network for financial assets is Sequentia, a sort of “Liquid on steroids”, without the BTC peg and above all with an anchoring to Bitcoin blocks, which allows – among other things – immediate cross-chain atomic swaps (confirmed at the first Bitcoin block).
Back in 2022 I presented the Sequentia idea to Adam Back himself, offering it as an upgrade to Liquid, but unfortunately Blockstream’s model has always been tied to the Bitcoin peg. Adam Back had admitted to me (and I talked about this in a dedicated article ) that he fully recognized the “centralizing” factor of the L-BTC peg, and in fact, in this industry, playing Cassandra is never wrong: in September we saw the Liquid hack with 4,000 Bitcoin stolen, even though they were later largely returned.
The free market of transaction fees: the end of gas tokens?
But how is it possible not to use a BTC peg? How are the transactions of the various assets paid for on the sidechain?
That’s the nice part, and it’s also why the definition of sidechain is a bit tight. In Sequentia, you can natively pay with any asset you have in your wallet.
It’s up to the block producers to assess the fee paid based on the market price of the asset used. If a payment is rejected onchain, you simply resubmit it paying the fee in another asset, a kind of “RBF” (Replace By Fee on Bitcoin, ed.).
This is the first “free market of transaction fees”. Another revolution in the blockchain world: to move assets, there is no need either to occupy space on the Bitcoin blockchain except for moving BTC (the so-called “tainting” as I heard Giacomo Zucco call it), or for a “gas token” on another blockchain, i.e. the various Ether or Tron of the moment. In my opinion Sequentia can be the end of gas tokens.
Well, we’re kind of getting carried away here, aren’t we?
Maybe, but why should a user keep paying a “tax” in a specific cryptocurrency that they otherwise wouldn’t know what to do with? And above all, imagine receiving USDT or USDC as payment and being able to send them on to someone else without first having to get Ether from an exchange! In the new system I dream of, there will only be Bitcoin as money, and financial assets such as tokenized stocks or bonds. Over time we’ll move towards a world where every trade will also be disintermediated in finance.
And to meet compliance needs in various jurisdictions, on Sequentia we’ve also introduced, compared to Liquid, the concept of a “Supervised” token. That opens up a whole other discussion that we probably don’t have time to cover, but it’s explained in the whitepaper !
When you say “we” introduced it, exactly who are you talking about?
I’m not alone, of course. Some of Sequentia’s Core developers are currently – or have been – part of the Blockstream team. Steven Roose himself (creator of TXHASH and founder of Second, which develops Ark) is our advisor and shareholder of Concatena Labs, Inc.
In 2022 we started development thanks to some Angel investors who allowed us to support a small team. But I admit that nowadays, with the advent of AI, only Andreas (A. Kohl, co-founder of Sequentia, ed.) and I can produce in a few weeks more than what, until last year, we could do with a team of several developers in months of work.
Future upgrades to the Bitcoin protocol and covenants
All clear Alberto, one last question: you showed us a Bitcoin wallet with Ark and the Lightning Network. Lightning has been on the market for many years and has only partially taken off, while Ark is essentially new to the community. Do you think the Bitcoin protocol will continue to evolve over the next few years?
Yes, absolutely. In my view, the next step at the Consensus upgrade level is covenants on Bitcoin. On Liquid and Sequentia, whose codebase is a Bitcoin fork called Elements, covenants have been in production for years, and on Bitcoin a smaller upgrade would be enough.
There are various valid proposals, such as BIP119 (CTV) or TXHASH, together with BIP348 (CSFS). Arca, the Ark version used on Sequentia for trading tokenized assets, is fully optimized thanks to covenants: funds don’t expire, and you don’t need to come back online periodically to renew them, nor rely on “watchtowers” to do it for you. On Bitcoin, Ark already works well today, but to reach state-of-the-art there as well, this “small” implementation would be ideal!
Thanks for the chat, Alberto! We wish you all the best. Would you like to leave a message for our readers?
Thanks to you! Yes, of course: I firmly believe that Bitcoin is at the dawn of a new technological and cultural renaissance, and that the quieter recent years, with less market hype, have actually been ideal for rolling up our sleeves and putting ideas into practice, producing something concrete. Soon we’ll see, even on a social level, the reality of a technology that is making giant strides! I believe in it more than ever, and I finally have before my eyes and in my hands something that would have seemed like an incredible dream to me until just a few years ago!
I invite everyone to try the wallet on sequentiatestnet.com . It’s a web wallet, no signup or installation needed. And to contact us, look for the Sequentia community on Telegram; there is also an Italian-language group.
I’d love for users’ impressions and ideas on how to improve the wallet and the other products we’ve developed (node, DEX, price server, explorer, bridge from other chains, etc.) to be reported back to us.
