Taproot Assets on Mainnet: Announcing tapd v0.3.0-alpha

They provide a link to the work: https://petertodd.org/2017/scalable-single-use-seal-asset-transfer. The sender also mentions that the key concepts in universes are very similar.The sender then announces the release of tapd v0.3.0-alpha, which is the first software release that supports the Taproot Asset Protocol on mainnet. They provide a link to the deterministic and reproducible release: https://github.com/lightninglabs/taproot-assets/releases/tag/v0.3.0. Additionally, they share a blog post about the launch of the protocol: https://lightning.engineering/posts/2023-10-18-taproot-assets-v0.3/.For those interested in monitoring the usage and activity of the protocol, the sender mentions that two Universes servers are being run - one for mainnet and one for testnet. They provide the links to these servers: - Mainnet: https://universe.lightning.finance/v1/taproot-assets/universe/roots- Testnet: https://testnet.universe.lightning.finance/v1/taproot-assets/universe/rootsThe sender also mentions that there is REST API documentation available for the Universe servers, which can be found here: https://lightning.engineering/api-docs/api/taproot-assets/rest-endpoints. They mention that users can interact with the servers directly via gRPC as well. Users have the option to run their own Universe server and federate with other universe servers using the relevant tapcli universe federation command.A technical specification for the Universe/Multiverse protocol is provided in the BIP located here: https://github.com/Roasbeef/bips/blob/bip-tap-pr/bip-tap-universe.mediawiki. The sender explains that a Universe server is used by clients to verify new asset issuance, archive off-chain transaction data, and transmit proof information for transfers. They mention that a Universe data structure is an authenticated merkle-sum sparse merkle tree that maps an (outpoint, scriptKey) tuple to proof data. The scriptKey is described as the protocol's version of the pkScript/scriptPubkey.The email also mentions that Bitcoin transactions are signed and verified under the hood, and a mapping from an asset state transition to a "virtual" transaction can be found here: https://github.com/Roasbeef/bips/blob/bip-tap-pr/bip-tap-vm.mediawiki. The sender highlights that reusing Bitcoin Script in the first asset script version allows higher-level applications to use a familiar PSBT-like structure (vPSBTs) to construct off-chain multi-party interactions. They provide an example of using PSTBs, vPSBTs, and SIGHASH_NONE to construct a protocol for non-interactive, non-custodial swaps: https://github.com/lightninglabs/taproot-assets/issues/577.In conclusion, the sender expresses their excitement about the mainnet alpha release of the Taproot Asset Protocol and invites experimentation and feedback to further improve the protocol. They express gratitude to those who provided critical feedback for earlier versions of the protocol.