Ryan Gentry, director of business development at Lightning Labs, says Taproot Assets is "how we Bitcoinize the dollar and the world's financial assets."

Bitcoin layer-2 infrastructure company Lightning Labs has released the mainnet alpha of Taproot Assets, a protocol that aims to enable stablecoins and real-world assets to be published on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network.

According to Ryan Gentry, head of business development at Lightning Labs, the current release, Taproot Assets v0.3, will provide a “full-featured developer experience” for issuing, managing and discovering stablecoins and other assets on the Bitcoin blockchain .

“We at Taproot Assets believe that this new era for Bitcoin will see multiple global currencies be issued and foreign exchange transactions around the world settled instantly via the Lightning Network.”

“With this release, developers can issue financial assets on-chain in a scalable manner,” Lightning Labs stated in a separate post on October 18. “Today marks a new era in multi-asset Bitcoin.”

This version of Taproot Assets will work by routing existing Bitcoin liquidity on the Lightning Network .

Gentry says the integration will expand Bitcoin's network effects and bring it one step closer to "the bitcoinization of the dollar." Added:

“This is how we turn Bitcoin into the global referral network for the internet of money. “This is how we bitcoinize the dollar and the world's financial assets.”

Gentry described developer demand for stablecoin implementations on Bitcoin as “very high”; especially considering that some stablecoin issuers own more US Treasury bonds than countries like Germany and South Korea.

"[This] speaks to the global importance of these assets and provides a sense of scale for global user demand," Gentry added.

Related: BitVM wasn't created to make Bitcoin fake Ethereum, developer says

According to Gentry, approximately 2,000 Taproot Assets were minted on testnets in the few months leading up to the mainnet's alpha launch.

Alpha launches usually mean that development is not in its final state. Lightning Labs said the alpha label indicates they expect the community to test it for potential bugs.

Bitcoin Drivechains (via Bitcoin Improvement Proposal-300), Botanix Labs' Spiderchain, and BitVM are among other developments aimed at expanding Bitcoin's capabilities within the Bitcoin ecosystem.