Bitlight Labs, a major contributor to the Bitcoin RGB protocol and a core infrastructure provider for native Bitcoin smart contracts and payments, announced it has raised $9.6 million in a Pre-A financing round led by Amber Group and Fundamental Labs, valuing the company at $170 million.
The capital will accelerate core protocol contributions to RGB and deepen integration with the Lightning Network, moving production-grade applications — including Lightning-native payments, wallets, and RGB-based stablecoin rails — into the market.
The round featured over twenty investors spanning cryptocurrency, stablecoin, traditional finance, and payments, including Amber Group, Fundamental Labs, United Overseas Bank, HV Capital, Outliers Fund, Taisu Ventures, Arkstream Capital, Signum Capital, Gate Ventures, and Sidedoor Ventures, alongside an undisclosed global stablecoin and digital asset firm.
The company stated: “This financing enables the execution of our long-term roadmap to seamlessly integrate RGB and the Lightning Network for stablecoin payments on Bitcoin. We will intensify focus on core protocol development, interoperability enhancements, and production deployments to deliver accessible settlement solutions for wallets, merchants, and enterprises.”
“RGB adds a scalable asset layer to Bitcoin without burdening the base chain. Combined with Lightning Network, it creates a practical path to high-throughput, low-fee stablecoin payments,” said a representative from Amber Group. “We believe Bitlight Labs is well positioned to catalyze adoption across wallets, payment flows, and enterprise integrations.”
RGB and Lightning Network: Native Stablecoin Rails on Bitcoin
RGB is a client-validated protocol for issuing and transacting digital assets on Bitcoin. By keeping contract and state data off-chain, RGB scales throughput and data size, supports sharding from day one, and interoperates with Layer 2 solutions. This allows users to hold and transfer assets — such as stablecoins — alongside BTC in the same wallet with sovereignty.
The Lightning Network is Bitcoin’s instant, low-fee payments network. Integrating RGB with Lightning Network provides asset-aware channel operations, routing, and real-time settlement while minimizing on-chain footprint and inheriting Bitcoin’s security model.
Bitlight Labs’ near-term priority is to advance RGB’s Lightning integration as the technical prerequisite for stablecoin payments on Bitcoin, enabling stablecoins to move natively over Lightning Network with wallet-level UX parity to BTC. The company is actively working with multiple stablecoin issuers and payment service providers to support multi-issuer interoperability, liquidity, and merchant-ready settlement flows.
Market Validation and Ecosystem Momentum
Tether plans to roll out USD₮ on RGB and confirmed in its official announcement.
According to Tether, bringing USD₮ to RGB is intended to deliver fast and lightweight payments on Bitcoin, enabling users to hold and transfer USD₮ alongside BTC in the same wallet and even facilitate offline value transfer. This development underscores the strategic importance of RGB and Lightning Network as complementary rails for native Bitcoin stablecoin payments.
About Bitlight Labs
Bitlight Labs is a Bitcoin infrastructure company and a major contributor to the RGB protocol, enabling native smart contracts and stablecoin transactions on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. The company builds core code, developer tooling, and applications that deliver scalable and sovereign asset transfers to the world’s most secure decentralized network.
Bitlight Labs focuses on core protocol engineering and reference implementations for RGB and Lightning interoperability, developer SDKs and node infrastructure, Lightning-integrated wallets and merchant/payment tooling, and infrastructure enabling multi-issuer stablecoin interoperability and settlement on Bitcoin via RGB. The company’s current emphasis is on shipping production-grade Lightning-RGB integrations to power stablecoin payments across consumer wallets, merchant acceptance, and enterprise settlement.
Explore the RGB protocol and Bitlight’s products at the Bitlight Labs official website, and follow the official X account for the latest updates.
Related Items:Advance Native, crypto Recommended for you Origin Summit Announces Wave 3: Animation Powerhouse Maggie Kang to Join Programming Lineup MANTRA: The First MultiVM Blockchain For RWAs With Native EVM And CosmWasm Support Bitcoin Price Prediction 2025 Experts Now Eyeing XRP Tundra Presale as Faster Route to Financial Freedom
