important notes
Amboss debuts RailsX on PlanB forums to perform atomic swaps entirely over Lightning Network channels without storage risk. Bitcoin DeFi soared 2000% in 2024, reaching $6.5 billion in TVL, with Babylon driving over 80% of the ecosystem growth. Lightning infrastructure expands as Taproot assets enable multi-asset support and Tether commits $8 million to stablecoin payments.
Amboss Technologies launched RailsX, a Lightning-native peer-to-peer (P2P) decentralized exchange, on January 30, 2026 at the PlanB Forum in El Salvador.
Unlike other exchanges that build separate protocol layers, RailsX executes trades entirely over the Lightning Network. Transactions function as circular self-payments. Funds are routed through the existing Lightning channel, atomically exchanging assets, and looped back to the sender. This eliminates the risk of custodial intermediaries and cross-chain bridges while maintaining Bitcoin’s security model.
RailsX announcement:
It is the most powerful tool for financial access and advances Bitcoin’s core principles of sovereignty and decentralization.RailsX powers peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions using Lightning, enabling KYC-free and self-managed P2P transactions. Lightning has become DEX.
⚡️🧵 pic.twitter.com/IQepZozlpb
— AMBOSS ⚡ (@ambosstech) January 30, 2026
“RailsX represents the next unstoppable step in the evolution of Bitcoin, providing true financial freedom to users around the world through self-custodial, scalable P2P transactions,” said Jesse Shrader, CEO of Amboss Technologies, in the announcement.
The platform builds on five years of development and integrates Amboss’ Magma liquidity marketplace and Rails automated liquidity services.
First peek at the RailsX user interface | Source: Ambos Blog
Bitcoin DeFi has just broken out in recent years
RailsX taps into the growing Bitcoin ecosystem. Bitcoin
BTC
84 397 dollars
24 hour volatility:
0.5%
Market capitalization:
$1.69 trillion
Vol. 24 hours:
$7.937 billion
Total DeFi locks surged 2000% in 2024, jumping from $307 million in January to $6.5 billion by the end of the year. Babylon, the staking protocol, drove much of that growth, accounting for over 80% of the sector’s TVL. Despite the current bear market, the total value of the Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem reached nearly $6.11 billion as of January 30, according to DefiLlama.
In June 2025, Lightning Labs released Taproot Assets v0.6, enabling multi-asset support in Lightning for the first time. Suddenly, stablecoins can be moved through Lightning Channels at a fraction of the cost of traditional transfers.
Tether saw an opportunity. The company pledged to issue USDT as Taproot Asset and injected $8 million into Speed1 to scale payments for the Lightning stablecoin. Speed already processes $1.5 billion in annual transaction volume for 1.2 million users with instant payments.
Bitcoin DeFi still lags behind Ethereum’s $66 billion TVL, but the gap is closing. According to the company, RailsX connects Bitcoin and stablecoin pairs to a $9.5 trillion foreign exchange market every day. The processing cost reaches 0.29% in the optimized configuration, but the actual price depends on the liquidity of the channel.
Success depends on Lightning’s ability to handle real-world transaction volumes. This is something DEXs have been promising for years, but rarely delivered at scale.
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José Rafael Peña Gollum is a crypto journalist and editor with nine years of experience in the crypto industry. He has written for top outlets such as CriptoNoticias, BeInCrypto, and CoinDesk. We specialize in Bitcoin, blockchain, and Web3 and produce news, analysis, and educational content for a global audience in both Spanish and English.
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