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Welcome to the latest edition of the Bitcoin Rollup. First, we’d like to thank everyone who followed @BitcoinRollups after its initial announcement this week. We’re stoked to be documenting the development of zk-rollups on Bitcoin.
Let’s dive straight in.
Light.btc reflects on bitcoinrollups.org’s one year anniversary
One year ago, John Light released the research report “Validity rollups on Bitcoin”. This report was the first comprehensive breakdown on Bitcoin rollups, and inspired much of the development happening in the space today.
Light released a thread reflecting on the report, and also shared a number of updates on teams building in the space. Definitely check it out if you’re not familiar with the recent developments here.
And, if you’re new to Bitcoin rollups, a great place to start is by listening to Simanta Guatam’s talk on a Taproot-based validity rollup. Watch that here.
Chainway shares why it differs from a sidechain
Chainway might be closed to deploying the first, in-production zk-rollup on Bitcoin. They recently wrote a thread on how their rollup differs from sidechains.
Tl;dr is that full nodes can retrieve an EVM transaction and verify it without trusting an extra P2P network, unlike sidechains.
It’s a good thread breaking down some of the nuances in their design. Over in Ethereum, there’s a lot of debate on what is a rollup, and what isn’t. And it’s looking like we might be having more of those conversations soon!
Overall, a great concise, clarifying piece from the Chainway team. Be sure to give them a follow on Twitter for more updates.
Article covering what Satoshi though on zero-knowledge proofs
Cointelegraph released an article covering some of Satoshi’s thoughts on zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) and how they’ve developed over the years.
It starts with highlighting a post in Bitcointalk where Satoshi pondered a “better version of Bitcoin” powered by ZKPs. Then, Eli Ben-Sasson highlights the progress ZKPs have made in both Zcash and Starknet.
ICYDK, Zcash, a privacy-focused fork of Bitcoin, was the first use of ZKPs in production. Starknet is an industry leading zk-rollup on Ethereum, and its lead developer organization StarkWare, is the creator of STARK proofs.
It goes on to quote Robin Linus from ZeroSync. Robin shares that ZKPs can bring mass scalability by enabling Bitcoin to process more than 100 transactions per second, while also bringing privacy properties to Bitcoin.
This article was definitely a great way to bounce back from the Bitcoin ETF gaffe they made a week prior. You can read the full piece here.
Fun fact: both STARKs, and a newer SNARK used in Zcash, removed the need for trusted setups, a big concern Bitcoiners had with these zero-knowledge proof systems 🙂
This edition’s educational pieces
The difference between Sovereign and Smart contract rollups
Actually… more definitions. Fluent breaks down the difference between sovereign and smart contract rollups. Check the thread below 👇
BitVM breakdown
Read the BitVM paper and felt a bit… lost? Bob Bodily wrote a great write up on the paper and the benefits it brings to Bitcoin and rollups. Paper linked here.
Some other blogs, tweets and articles
Rollups are… real?
As mentioned, in the Ethereum space, there can be some debates over rollup definitions. A few months back Jon Charbonneau, of DBA, released a research report/blog that turned some heads. It was penned “Rollups Aren’t Real” and covered the various components within rollup infrastructure, and how rollups can operate in a more trustless fashion.
Last week, he released another blog/report called “Do Rollups Inherit Security?” with the tweet stating “Rollups Are Real”.
Are rollups real? We think so, and this blog might clarify why we're closer to rollups than we think.
You should read it, but get comfortable. It’s a long one.
Another Bitcoin rollup on the way?
@EdisonTimothy is building a sovereign rollup using Lambda Class’ Starknet stack! The rollup can currently generate transactions and proofs, post them to Bitcoin, and fetch and verify them!
It’s awesome to see an independent developer building a sovereign rollup. The project is called “SovCoin” and is simply described as a proof-of-concept sovereign zk-rollup built on top of Bitcoin.
Hell yeah. GitHub repo here.
What’s this all for?
Udi Wertheimer put out a tweet recently (featured below) that shares why teams are building Ordinals and rollups on Bitcoin. We want to transact in Bitcoin daily, have BTC be the unit of account and not use custodial solutions (a.k.a banks).
For more context on why we should reject the notion of “Bitcoin Maximalism”, you should check out Udi’s appearance on The Aubservation.
Some more tweets
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Lambda Class working on tech that lets you launch a Bitcoin rollup in one click 🤔
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To be fair, Rollkit did launch the first sovereign, Bitcoin rollup (on testnet) 🙂
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How are we going to ensure Bitcoin Layer 2s are interoperable? ⚛️
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The security of rollups’ execution layer comes from Bitcoin the protocol, not the asset
Jobs in the space
- Chainway - Senior Protocol Engineer. Experience in storage management, p2p networking, and/or protocol design is a plus.