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Author: Arjun CHAND, Bankless; Compilation: Tao Zhu, Bitchain Vision Realm
The development of Bitcoin has exploded.
New primitives such as Ordinals, Runes and BRC-20 are occupying the center stage.This marks a major change in the atmosphere of the Bitcoin ecosystem.It is focusing on using BTC as an asset and developing into a more dynamic ecosystem, providing people with different things to use, build and speculation.
In the Bitcoin ecosystem, L2 is now a new popular thing.Everyone wants to share a share of Bitcoin L2 cake.
In today’s story, we will narrow the perspective and fully understand the Bitcoin L2 scene.We will answer key questions for those who have just exposed to the concept of Bitcoin L2:The necessity of L2, their current status, future development, and their final state.Let’s take a closer look!
Why does Bitcoin need L2?
The design of the Bitcoin network is given priority to security and decentralization, and weighs the scalability and expressiveness of its blockchain.Although this makes BTC a more valuable asset, this also means that the network is not an ideal infrastructure for building financial applications, such as Ethereum.
In the past ten years, the Bitcoin community has been working hard to solve scalability problems. During the peak of network traffic, the transaction cost was as high as tens of dollars.Today, driven by Experiments such as Ordinals, Runes, BRC-20, etc., the demand for Bitcoin block space is exploring a new height:
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From December 2023, Ordinals has led to an increase of 280%of Bitcoin costs.
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Since the birth of Bitcoin, rune transactions account for 68%of Bitcoin’s total transaction volume.
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In the past year, BRC-20 has caused Bitcoin’s trading costs to soar, and these costs once accounted for 74%of block rewards.
Bitcoin’s vision is to allow everyone to access and adopt.To achieve this goal, it must be able to expand to process more traffic without spending a lot of cost on each transaction.The demand for Bitcoin block space is increasing, highlighting the demand for the expansion of Bitcoin and reflecting the demand for Bitcoin L2.
The current situation of Bitcoin L2
Bitcoin communities have been actively committed to improving transactions scalability for many years.A key development step in this field isLightning network—— A payment channel agreement is designed to achieve faster and more affordable transactions through processing outside the Bitcoin L1.
Although the Lightning Network has been the flagship solution for Bitcoin scalability vision for a long time, the community has increasingly recognized its limitations.It is agreed that the Lightning Network may not be the final expansion solution of Bitcoin and require better Bitcoin L2.
Eric Wall recently discussed the needs of improvement of L2, indicating that the future of Bitcoin scalability may exceed the current scope of the Lightning Network.
But what will this bring to us?How can we build more effective Bitcoin L2?
Bitvm trust minimize commitment commitment
at present,The focus of people’s attention is BITVM, which is a new model of executing Turing -Line contracts on Bitcoin, which can pave the way for Bitcoin Optimistic Rollups.
The main reason for the community to support BITVM rather than any other method is the compatibility it upgraded with TAPROOT.This means that BITVM can be deployed without further modification of the Bitcoin network, thereby retaining the existing rules of the network.For all types of people in the Bitcoin community, it is a win -win situation.
The Bitvm method involves the execution of the chain of the transaction and has the function of verifying the transaction in the challenge window through fraud. This is a mechanism similar to the Ethereum Optimistic Rollups.
Even if there is only one proof, the system can run, but there is a trust assumption that there must always be at least one honest verifier in the system that can detect and broadcast malicious transactions.However, this also means that if all verifications are damaged, the integrity of Bitcoin will face risks, because attackers can issue fraud transactions on the Internet.
Bitvm only allows creating a trusted Bitcoin L2 (such as Optimistic Rollups), and does not allow the creation of Bitcoin L2 (such as ZK-RollUps).In addition, similar to the Optimistic Rollups on Ethereum, Bitvm is facing challenges such as the liquidity of potential withdrawal to ensure the liquidity of potential withdrawals such as a long time and a large amount of funds.
Therefore, the Bitcoin community has a certain degree of doubts about Bitvm’s practicality.But it is worth noting that Bitvm is still in the early stages of development and is expected to expand Bitcoin through Optimistic Rollups.
Zero knowledge proof of dreams
This brings us a main problem-What is the final state of Bitcoin L2?The answer is ZK Rollups!
However, it is not easy to build ZK-Rollups on Bitcoin, and it is now technically impossible … This will need to change the Bitcoin network by soft fork. We all know that it is easy to do.
The soft fork will add a new operating code to Bitcoin, which will enable it to identify and verify zero -knowledge proof locally, thereby allowing Bitcoin and Rollup to perform no trustworthy interaction.However, as mentioned above, this is a major technical barrier, and its feasibility is still uncertain.
But wait a minute.Given that BITVM is still in the early stages, it is currently neither optimistic nor ZK-Rollups on Bitcoin. So how do we have so many Bitcoin L2 in our ecosystem?
Okay, the reality is,Technically, the real bitcoin Rollup does not exist.What we see is that a group of focused teams are laying the foundation for future Bitcoin L2.
For example, some Rollup teams (such as BOB) are adopting a phase of staged method.They first guided the ecosystem to EVM ROLLUP to attract users, liquidity and applications.Then, once the technology is mature, they plan to use Bitvm to transition to Optimistic Rollups. In the end, their goal is to evolve to ZK-Rollup, specifically depending on whether Bitcoin experiences soft forks to add the necessary operating code.
Summarize
With the promotion, the possibility of fraud also follows.In a heated discussion, many projects lied that it was Bitcoin L2, so it was important to keep investors and users cautious.It is not conclusive for many projects that claim to be L2, or they just use buzzwords to attract venture capital and retail investment.
Nevertheless, for the Bitcoin community, this is still an exciting moment.From the launch of the Bitcoin spot ETF that marks the milestone used by the organization, to the original terms such as Ordinals, BRC-20, and Runes, the Bitcoin ecosystem is undergoing unprecedented growth and innovation.
The prospect of Bitcoin L2 adds people’s future excitement.
