Route Blinding Has Been Merged Into The Lightning Spec
Route blinding is a technique to increase the privacy of Lightning Network transactions.
![Route Blinding Has Been Merged Into The Lightning Spec](/content/images/size/w1200/2023/03/sanjeevan-satheeskumar-iZp4h1gXiEQ-unsplash.jpg)
- After almost 3 years after the initial version, route blinding has been added to the Lightning specification.
- Route blinding allows a recipient to provide a blinded route to potential payers, thus improving receiver privacy.
- This is an alternative to rendezvous to preserve recipient anonymity and has a different set of trade-offs: Onions are re-usable, but the privacy guarantees are a bit weaker and require more work (e.g. when handling errors).
Here's a quick route blinding breakdown and development status update by @niftynei:
![](https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/content/images/2023/03/image-30.png)