The Lightning Network Specification, known as BOLT (Basis of Lightning Technology), is the set of documents defining the peer-to-peer protocol for Bitcoin’s Lightning payment-channel network. It standardises channel establishment, commitment transactions, HTLC-based routing, onion message encryption, and gossip propagation so that independent implementations interoperate. The specification is the canonical reference enabling trust-minimised off-chain Bitcoin payments.
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- The BOLT documents cover transport encryption, channel funding, the commitment-transaction state machine, HTLC forwarding, and the gossip protocol for route discovery. Adherence guarantees interoperability across implementations such as LND, Core Lightning, and Eclair.