The post The New Wave Of Bitcoin L2s Are Sidechains appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

I heard a lot of people say no one could define an L2 at Bitcoin Asia. The problem is that we have a definition, and most people just want to ignore it. Marketing, eh. “Bitcoin L2s” are the hottest thing on the street. People are using a bunch of jargon to distract users from trust assumptions and shill Bitcoin Season 2. Why all the sudden energy? See, about a year ago, some teams figured out how to use Bitcoin as a data availability layer for rollups. Others have been working on improving trust assumptions related to bridges (aka two-way peg). The research has been making great progress, and a lot of projects think we’ll have rollup-like blockchains in production by 2025. 2025? Some projects claim to be on mainnet now? Teams have taken this energy and are prematurely promoting the modular thesis for Bitcoin scaling. Projects are launching with bridge contracts on blockchains that aren’t Bitcoin, and are marketing themselves as Bitcoin L2s. Infrastructure providers amplify their message and boast that Bitcoin is back. But these solutions don’t scale Bitcoin. They’re completely independent, centralized sidechains. Layers they say? More like layers of trust assumptions. Definitions A lot of these projects are trying to adopt the modular thesis for Bitcoin scaling. This basically means that each aspect of the transaction lifecycle can be its own specialized system. Execution, transaction ordering, and data availability can all be operated by independent actors. Bitcoin will be the settlement layer at the base of it all. It’s not a terrible thesis when you dive into it. But its current implementation on Bitcoin is a bit worse for wear. A lot of the new projects claim to be “rollups”. Rollups would use Bitcoin for data availability, and post their latest state root, and enough transactions to…

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Filed under: News - @ May 20, 2024 6:20 pm