# libbolt

A pure-Rust library implementation of BOLT: Blind Off-chain Lightweight Transactions.

BOLT is a system for conducting privacy-preserving off-chain payments between pairs of individual parties. BOLT is designed to provide a Layer 2 payment protocol for privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies such as Zcash, by allowing individuals to establish and use payment channels for instantaneous payments that do not require an on-chain transaction.

# WARNING

The libbolt library is a proof of concept implementation that relies on experimental libraries and dependencies at the moment. It is not suitable for production software yet.

# Dependencies

* secp256k1
* libsodium
* bn
* bulletproofs

# Installation

Please ensure you have installed the libsodium library for your platform. See install instructions [here](https://download.libsodium.org/doc/installation/index.html).

To compile the library, run `make` 

# Tests

To run libbolt tests, run `cargo test` or `make test`

# Benchmarks

To run libbolt benchmarks, run `cargo bench` or `make bench`

# Usage

To use the libbolt library, add the `libbolt` crate to your dependency file in `Cargo.toml` as follows:

```toml
[dependencies]
libbolt = "0.1.0"
```

Then add an extern declaration at the root of your crate as follows:
```rust
extern crate libbolt;
```

# API

The libbolt library provides APIs for three types of privacy-preserving payment channels:

* unidirectional payment channels (*work in progress*)
* bidirectional payment channels (done)
* third-party payments (done)

**TODO**

# Documentation

Build the api documentation by simply running `make doc`. Documentation will be generated in your local `target/doc` directory.

For the libbolt design documentation, see the `docs/bolt_design.pdf`.

# Contributions

To contribute code improvements, please checkout the repository as follows:

	git clone https://github.com/yeletech/libbolt.git

	
# License

Licensed under MIT (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)