Adds Hydranet case study

Author: ConorOkus

docs/_blog/building-the-off-chain-future-with-ldk.md

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+---
+title: "Building the off-chain future with LDK"
+description: "Hydranet."
+date: "2025-11-05"
+authors:
+  - Fede
+tags:
+  - DEX
+  - Case-Studies
+---
+
+For years, trading Bitcoin meant choosing between slow bridges and high fees, or giving up custody of your funds. We all know how it ends when you do the latter, while the former is a big burden for your profitability. [Hydranet](https://www.hydranet.ai/) is building the first off-chain settlement layer to end those trade-offs, a third layer on top of prominent blockchain scaling solutions such as the Lightning Network. This isn’t just about trading, it’s about building the off-chain infrastructure that can scale crypto for the future, with LDK as a core building block. Our goal is to provide a robust, multi-chain infrastructure that solves the blockchain trilemma of decentralization, security, and scalability right at its core, providing a crypto experience that feels as smooth as centralized platforms but without the centralized baggage.
+
+At its core, Hydranet removes the reliance on bridges and wrapped assets. Using nothing but native currencies, trades and transactions are executed via off-chain atomic swaps, ensuring they either complete fully or not at all. State channels cut out the delays and costs, turning cross-chain interactions from a frustrating process into something that just works, both for professionals and everyday users. 
+
+To turn this vision into life, our team needed an implementation that could handle Bitcoin natively, support our off-chain atomic swaps, and integrate into multiple environments efficiently. Lightning Dev Kit (LDK) was the natural fit for this. 
+
+# Hydranet’s Implementation Journey
+
+Before LDK, our options for integrating Bitcoin into our off-chain ecosystem were limited. Existing Lightning implementations were built as monolithic daemons, which made them hard to integrate deeply into our platform. Running a separate process, juggling RPC, and being limited by the node’s own assumptions around storage, key management, or chain backend all added friction to both the development and end result.
+
+What LDK does that no other solution really offers is its library-first design. Instead of adapting to a standalone node, we can compile LDK directly into our application. This gives us the flexibility to customize persistence, networking, key management, and backend logic exactly as we need it to be, and it also enables us to access a full lightning node from any device, independent of its operating system.
+
+On top of all this, the documentation is clear and the LDK team has been very supportive, which has made integration much easier.
+
+# Technical Aspects
+
+Hydranet combines the Lightning Network for BTC and our in-house Lithium Network for smart contract based blockchains into a unified off-chain layer. Users can access this layer easily through the Hydranet wallet, an off-chain-ready, multi-currency wallet with state channel management and cross-chain trading functionality.
+
+While Lithium is built in-house, LDK powers the Bitcoin side of this architecture, enabling:
+
+- **Cross-chain atomic swaps**, integrating with Hydranet’s Lithium Network to enable Bitcoin swaps across multiple supported blockchains, secured by hashed timelock contracts (HTLC).
+- **Rapid Gossip Sync support**, ensuring up-to-date Lightning Network information with minimal bandwidth and faster synchronization.
+- **Custom pathfinding and routing**, to integrate with Hydranet’s off-chain order book and decentralized off-chain network.
+- **Seamless integration**, allowing Lightning to coexist with Lithium in a single self-custodial application independent of the operating system.
+
+[IMAGE]
+
+With LDK, Hydranet can now offer:
+
+- **A real-time order book DEX** with support for native Bitcoin on the Lightning Network.
+- **Native BTC cross-chain swaps** without on-chain bridges or wrapped assets. All P2P and trustless.
+- **Gasless trades** with instant finality.
+- **Direct access**, where users only need the Hydranet app, no third-party services or infrastructure required
+- **Lightning-fast synchronization**, ensuring up-to-date Lightning network data within seconds.
+- **Improved usability with 0 confirmation channels**, enabling instant BTC trades.
+
+For users, this means something new: trade Bitcoin against Ethereum (or USDC, ARB, SOL, etc.) in seconds, with no gas fees and no custodians! For developers and entrepreneurs, Hydranet creates a new era of applications that operate with lightning-fast speed and infinite scalability, all while inheriting the unbreakable security and trustlessness of leading Layer 1 blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. 
+
+The latest version of Hydranet is always available on our [website](https://hydranet.ai). For more details, check out our [documentation](https://docs.hydranet.ai), and if you’d like support or want to connect with other Hydranet enthusiasts, join us on [Discord]() and follow us on [X](https://x.com/TheHydranet)