We're excited to announce the release of LND v0.21! Fittingly, our latest release lands on a number that bitcoiners know well, a nod to the 21 million bitcoin supply cap, and this release is something of a coming-of-age moment for LND. This release brings privacy-preserving onion message support to LND for the first time, graduates simple taproot channels to a production-ready feature, and continues our journey of moving LND's data stores onto a native SQL backend. Together, these changes lay the foundation for a more private, more capable, and more performant Lightning Network. Some of the release highlights include:

• Basic onion messaging support, a privacy-preserving way for nodes to send messages through the network without revealing the sender or route, introduced via a new peer-to-peer message type. This paves the way for advanced privacy features and future protocol upgrades like BOLT 12 offers.
• Production-ready simple taproot channels with the finalized taproot channel scripts, optimized signature checks, and RBF cooperative close support. This sets the stage to finalize taproot gossip, eventually leading to public taproot channels.
• Payment store migration to native SQL, continuing the data store modernization journey, for better performance and scalability.
• Fast initial sync for Neutrino nodes which cuts the initial sync for a fresh light-client node from hours to minutes on mainnet, by bootstrapping its block and filter headers from a file or URL instead of fetching them one at a time from peers.

As always, we are grateful for the ongoing support of our external contributors and community across development, review, and testing. For the complete list of changes included in this release, check out the full release notes.

...read more at lightning.engineering