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sBTC and the Future of Bitcoin Rollups
Andre Serrano
March 24, 2023
Dear Bitcoiners,
Welcome to Bitcoin Writes, the go-to place for updates on sBTC. I know the past several weeks have been chaotic in the macro economy, but the sBTC working group remains heads down toward the sBTC Alpha release. Read below for the latest details on how sBTC is growing the Bitcoin economy.
What are sBTC Critical Bounties?
Earlier this month we published the go-to-market flywheel for building a developer ecosystem around sBTC. Phase 1 includes identifying bounties for critical tooling, infrastructure and applications to help the ecosystem take off.
After weeks of developer interviews, we are pleased to share we have published 15+ critical bounties for Q2, including $300K worth of grants for developers to begin contributing to sBTC.
The full list is published here on Github.
👉 Takeaway: critical bounties are a great way for community contributors to have an impact on sBTC development. We encourage everyone to review this list and provide feedback.
sBTC and the Future of Bitcoin rollups
Rollups are an exciting development for scaling decentralized applications. They also have the potential to improve privacy and programmability for Bitcoin.
Earlier this month, Muneeb Ali shared details on the R&D effort to integrate rollups with the Stacks layer. According to the post, “Without modifying Bitcoin L1, an sBTC-like design is the most trust-minimized way to move BTC in and out of Bitcoin layers.”
This means that with the launch of sBTC, sovereign rollups become even more interesting to deploy.
👉 TLDR: The Stacks layer can potentially provide the decentralized signers for a trust-minimized BTC asset that can be used in sovereign rollups. This opens up new opportunities for scaling Bitcoin layers.
For in-depth research on this topic, I recommend John Light’s report, Validity Rollups On Bitcoin.
💻 Engineering Updates
Igor
sBTC Eng Working Group presented sBTC Alpha progress during 3/24 Stacks Community call (Slides)
We have unblocked the riskiest project in sBTC Alpha, the integration of FROST with Bitcoin signing.
Remaining sBTC Eng work include non-risky construction and signing of Stacks transactions for minting/burning of sBTC.
Sign up to become a test user for the upcoming sBTC Alpha using this form.
@Ӿoloki#3105
Merged frost PR#92 Fix BIP340 challenge
Merged core-eng PR#75 Integrate frost and bitcoin
@donpdonp#1984
Helped core-eng PR#88 stacks-coordinator polls stacks-node for peg-in list
Helped core-eng PR#75 Integrate frost and bitcoin
Progress: core-eng PR#196 adapt peg-out logic from pr#75 into stacks-coord
@fjs#4368
@mårten#2709
⚒️ Go-To-Market Updates
Published list of critical bounties for sBTC tooling & infrastructure (Link)
Developed a messaging framework for key terms and target audiences
Updated sBTC feature backlog with business case prioritization
Reviewed third iteration of sBTC brand design
🌍 Around the Ecosystem
Signing off,
Andre