New York, America, December 15th, 2023, Chainwire
In the sphere of Bitcoin’s on-chain assets, a groundbreaking paradigm emerges with Bitboost’s exploration of programmability, transforming Bitcoin into a dynamic asset playground. Protocols such as Ordinals, BRC-20, and Atomicals have significantly enriched Bitcoin’s on-chain assets, offering a novel approach to scaling Bitcoin: utilizing Bitcoin as a bulletin board to publish assets and executing asset transactions off-chain through indexers. Unlike rollups, this method doesn’t validate transaction execution results on Bitcoin, making it completely agnostic to Bitcoin.
Through this approach, many popular assets have been issued on Bitcoin. The issuance method for these assets is fair minting, allowing anyone to mint a certain quantity of assets through a Bitcoin transaction. This issuance method provides participants with a fair opportunity and results in a decentralized distribution of assets, aligning more closely with the principles of decentralization. Most of these assets were issued starting in March, and as of today, some popular assets, such as $ORDI and $SATS, have market caps exceeding 1 billion USD, leading to significant wealth effects.
The Hidden Challenges Behind the Popularity of Asset Protocols
Behind the popularity, these asset protocols also suffer from many problems. Firstly, the asset issuance pattern is singular and fixed, supporting only fair minting and lacking support for additional issuance methods such as whitelists and IDOs. Secondly, the asset circulation pattern is also very rigid, supporting only transfers and exchanges with BTCs, without accommodating DeFi applications like swap, lending, staking, and more. Users are limited to actions such as minting, holding, and buying/selling with BTC, restricting the utility of these assets.
The fundamental reason for this type of problem is that the assets lack programmability. All functions of the assets are hardcoded in the protocol, and users cannot redefine them. Taking BRC-20 as an example, the asset’s functions are limited to deploy, mint, and transfer. If these assets can interact with smart contracts, users are then able to modify or add functions through the creation of smart contracts, and the problem of fixed functionality patterns can be completely solved.
Bitboost’s Unique Solution: The end Game of the Programmable Asset Protocol
Bitboost has conducted research on all publicly available smart contract solutions on Bitcoin, such as on-chain solutions like BitVM, sidechain solutions like Rootstock and Stacks, and layer 2 solutions like RGB and BEVM. After analyzing and comparing the strengths and weaknesses of all these solutions, Bitboost believes that designing a programmable asset protocol on Bitcoin should adhere to the following principles:
- Simplicity: It should not add excessive burden to the Bitcoin network.
- Security: Malicious behaviors from some participants could not lead to protocol failures.
- Compatibility: It should be compatible with existing wallets, explorers, and other tools.
Based on these principles, Bitboost has been incubated. Bitboost publishes Ethereum-style transactions on Bitcoin and utilizes an off-chain indexer with EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) integrated to execute these transactions. This allows for launching an EVM execution environment on Bitcoin, enabling the issuance of assets and deployment of DeFi applications within this environment.
- In terms of simplicity, Bitboost packages and compresses transactions into batches, similar to rollups, and then publishes these batches to the Bitcoin network. The transaction size and fee can be an order of magnitude lower than Bitcoin transactions.
- In terms of security, the entire protocol does not rely on multi-signatures and will not be halted by the failure of some nodes. Like other Bitcoin asset protocols, it is completely trustless.
- In terms of compatibility, the protocol participants can be divided into users and miners. For users, Bitboost is like an Ethereum chain and can be interacted with using existing Ethereum tools such as Metamask. For miners, they only need to help the protocol to inscribe transactions from the mempool onto Bitcoin through the Ordinals protocol, and then receive Bitboost’s native token as a reward.
Bitboost is referred to as a co-processor of Bitcoin. It is similar to how a GPU is commonly referred to as a co-processor of CPU, where the CPU delegates computationally intensive display tasks to the GPU, and the GPU, after computation, returns the results to the user through the screen. Bitcoin delegates the processing tasks of on-chain assets to Bitboost, and after Bitboost completes the processing, it returns the results to users through Ethereum-compatible APIs.
The difference between Bitboost and rollups lies in the fact that Bitboost’s state roots are not synchronized to Bitcoin, so they are not validated on Bitcoin through validity proofs or fraud proofs. Since Bitcoin does not have smart contracts, it lacks the ability to validate state roots. Therefore, a trustless 1:1 asset-pegged bridge between Bitboost and Bitcoin cannot be established. Instead, in Bitboost, the native token is exchanged with BTC through PBSTs (Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions), the same way as other on-chain assets.
About Bitboost
Bitboost pioneers programmability in Bitcoin’s on-chain assets, offering a unique solution that combines simplicity, security, and compatibility. As a co-processor to Bitcoin, Bitboost introduces a new era, allowing users to redefine asset functions through smart contracts and enhancing the overall utility and scalability of the Bitcoin network.
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