last updated 2023-10-31	Main Menu- Mastering Evrmore
	Main Menu- EvrLight and Nostr4Evr

The announcement of EvrLight, which was made on Oct 31st 2023 on the first anniversary of Evrmore's launch, is recorded here. It provides a good summary of why EvrLight is important and why it can be important to Nostr:

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Those of you who have followed my work know that much of it has focused on low-level protocol. In 2018 I began working with the Medici developers to debug Ravencoin's basic UTXO asset functionality, and eventually it led to the planned enhancements documented in the Evrmore whitepaper. But most importantly, I know that Evrmore must attract users and developers for real-world use cases. Doing so requires interfacing with other projects and communities. To accomplish that, I have increasingly focused on asset atomic swap technology as a key building block. I spent substantial effort 2 years ago debugging asset HTLCs on testnet and successfully executed cross-chain atomic swaps of assets in exchange for Bitcoin. I implemented that asset functionality with some needed bugfixes on Evrmore's mainnet when it launched a year ago.

Earlier this year I went even deeper down the HTLC rabbit hole to understand in detail how Komodo's AtomicDEX technology functions and what it would take to support EVR and Evrmore Assets. I turned on EVR support in AtomicDEX but decided not to invest the time yet to implement Evrmore assets in AtomicDEX because I realized something much more important.
I realized that since
    a) Bitcoin and Evrmore are both based on UTXOs and addresses,
    b) Bitcoin-Lightning is based on HTLCs and secret-locked invoices, and
    c) Evrmore supports HTLCs for both EVR and Evrmore Assets in a very Bitcoin-like way,
that means something hugely important: It means that Evrmore is the perfect Layer-1 for diverse Lightning assets in the same way that Bitcoin is the Layer-1 for Lightning money.

In retrospect it is obvious, like the way many of the best inventions are. This technology, which I call EvrLight, is an enhanced protocol based on BTC-Lightning submarine swap technology interacting with the Evrmore on-chain UTXO Assets. It takes advantage of the strengths of both Evrmore and Bitcoin-Lightning to enable users to buy and sell Evrmore Assets using only a Lightning-capable Bitcoin wallet, the EvrLight protocol, and associated automation code. It will enable transactions which are atomic and non-custodial, with low fees, and 1-conf average settlement time of just over 2 minutes. Moreover, the transactions will be privacy-enhanced because the Lightning invoice payment leaves no on-chain record of the source of the Bitcoins. I have been working through the details and have documented the first draft of my work for other developers to study, begin testing, and help generate reference code examples for different languages. It will take time for developers to implement it in applications before end users can enjoy its benefits. But it is certainly worth celebrating with this announcement on Evrmore's birthday.

EvrLight will make it possible to build asset-based Commerce and DeFi applications for users who do not need to know anything about Evrmore. But all commerce, including a DEX, also requires an orderbook or other mechanism for buyers and sellers to communicate. Therefore I also want to highlight the strategic opportunity which is emerging from the Nostr protocol. Like Evrmore, Nostr embraces the core values of Bitcoin and a focus on protocols. From a technology viewpoint, Nostr is a perfect fit for EvrLight. Not only are many of the Nostr developers also Lightning developers, but Nostr's users generate a private/public key pair as their effective user ID, and that key can be directly translated to an Evrmore address. That means that, without any prior communication, you can directly interact with Nostr users for EvrLight transactions using their address and know that they will have the needed private key.

Nostr is still a tiny project compared to its competitors, and one of the biggest challenges will be in finding a revenue model which can support the needed infrastructure and developers to compete with the well-financed social media titans. EvrLight can provide the tools to add powerful peer-to-peer social commerce and DeFi capabilities to Nostr. I am working on an EvrLight example application for Nostr and a list of apps worth writing, which I will promote under the name Nostr4Evr. I hope other developers will join me. Working with Nostr is a win-win opportunity.

As most of you know and anyone can see in the explorer, we have accomplished our work this year without touching the minerdevfund. As the price of EVR rises, the Evrmore Foundation will begin using your minerdevfund as intended to pay a few part-time followed by full-time developer salaries and bounties to help speed up the pace of progress.

There has never been a more exciting time for Evrmore. We are just getting started. Welcome to the new world where the EvrLight protocol will make it possible to buy and sell Evrmore assets using only a Lightning-capable Bitcoin wallet. See the website for more information.

Happy Birthday Evrmore !!!

"In Theory There Is No Difference Between Theory and Practice, While In Practice There Is"

Note: this is in no way related to the wonderful book "Mastering Bitcoin" by Andreas Antonopoulos