|
The crypto market has seen unusual movements recently, especially Bitcoin, which broke out of the sluggish market that had lasted for several months. With the news that the Bitcoin spot ETF is about to be approved, the price has repeatedly broken through the year's high of $35,000, and the year-to-date increase has even reached more than 110%, making the entire cryptocurrency market boil again.
The Bitcoin ecosystem has lived up to expectations. First, the BitVM white paper was released at the beginning of last month , depicting a path for Bitcoin to become Turing complete, and looking forward to building a vibrant ecosystem like Ethereum in the future.
Immediately after the release of Lightning Network's Taproot Assets , if BitVM is still a fantasy, Taproot Assets may truly mark the arrival of a new era for Bitcoin, meaning that it will be possible to issue various assets on the Bitcoin mainnet in the future and achieve high-speed and low-cost settlement and transfer with the help of the Lightning Network.
Coupled with the release of a series of new protocols in the Brc20 ecosystem, led by Ordinals, the community is increasingly calling for more Bitcoin ecosystems: Is the summer of the Bitcoin ecosystem really here? How is it developing so far? Lightning Network Taproot Assets Launched The launch of Lightning Network Taproot Assets is a major event that caused a sensation in the industry. If the Bitcoin ecosystem really flourishes in the future, the birth of Taproot Assets is likely to be a milestone event.
The existence of Bitcoin as digital gold is the most solid consensus in the past decade. However, as the output of Bitcoin decreases, the income of miners who maintain the security of the entire Bitcoin network system is also decreasing. If Bitcoin only exists as an isolated digital gold in the future, and does not develop a stronger ecosystem to empower the value of the entire miner group, then the security of the entire Bitcoin network will be threatened in the future. As digital gold alone, the handling fees contributed to miners are unlikely to attract enough computing power to serve as the underlying security guarantee of Bitcoin.
Therefore, the Bitcoin ecosystem has become a hot topic and exploration direction in recent years. In the first half of this year, the Brc20 protocol, led by the Ordinals protocol, brought a wave of new energy to the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. However, for the Brc20 project, the Bitcoin network only passively records data. Once issued, the project party has no possibility to withdraw, destroy, repurchase, etc. the token. Without the empowerment and operation of the team, it is difficult for a project to truly grow.
The release of the BitVM white paper brings new hope for Bitcoin to achieve its goal of Turing completeness, but it is just a white paper, and there are still a series of problems to be solved.
The release of Lightning Network Taproot Assets may mean that Bitcoin is truly beginning to move towards a multi-asset era like Ethereum. Through Taproot Assets, developers can issue and destroy assets, and the assets issued by Taproot Assets in the future will be directly compatible with the existing more than 14,000 Lightning Network nodes, using the global Lightning Network for high-speed and low-cost asset circulation, combining the security of the Bitcoin blockchain mainnet with the high speed and low fees of the Lightning Network. If everything goes well, it is indeed a relatively perfect Bitcoin second-layer solution. Figure: Current global lightning network nodes, channels and locked BTC data But is this really the case?
Although the launch of Taproot Assets has caused a sensation in the industry, it is not unanimous applause at present, and there is no lack of doubts in the Bitcoin developer community. Fiatiaf, the founder of the decentralized social network Nostr, which was popular in the first half of this year, said that "the Lightning Network is a scam that has been defrauding Bitcoin users of their time, energy and money for 6 years." In addition, two Lightning Network developers recently announced their departure from the Lightning Network, and the difficult-to-solve loop vulnerability that broke out in the Lightning Network seem to indicate that:
Even if Taproot Assets is successfully launched, the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem based on Taproot Assets' multi-asset issuance will still have a bumpy road ahead, and there are still many problems that need to be overcome. Other Bitcoin Layer2 The RGB protocol is a very senior Layer 2 in the Bitcoin ecosystem, first proposed in 2016. RGB is a second-layer network built on the Bitcoin blockchain network. Its core data is stored on the Bitcoin mainnet, and it aims to use the security of the mainnet to implement Bitcoin's smart contract function.
RGB's vision is very good . In addition to leveraging the unique security of the Bitcoin mainnet, it also provides enhanced privacy. Users can achieve absolute confidentiality through certain operations, which is more censorship-resistant. Moreover, because its smart contracts are stored off-chain, it brings very low transaction fees and reduces the congestion of the Bitcoin blockchain.
However, since its launch, RGB seems to have remained unknown and has not made much breakthrough in the ecosystem.
Until April this year, RGB released version 0.10, which brought many major breakthroughs and solved various problems in previous versions, including limitations on smart contract development, integration with the lightning network, support for wallets, etc. The release of this version has cleared many obstacles for developers in the RGB ecosystem, and the RGB ecosystem has begun to flourish.
In the future, whether it is DeFi, NFT, GameFi, SocialFi, DAO, etc., it is expected to be implemented on the Bitcoin mainnet using the RGB protocol. Moreover, through the seamless connection between RGB and the Lightning Network, high-speed and low-cost circulation of assets can be achieved, injecting new vitality into the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
At present, various ecological applications have appeared on the RGB protocol , including wallets, derivatives and spot Dex and other DeFi applications, NFT wallets and trading markets, browsers, etc., but the time is not long, and they are basically still in the development or internal testing stage.
In short, judging from the route design of RGB, it seems to be consistent with the above-mentioned Lightning Network Taproot Assets to a certain extent. Both of them use the security performance of the Bitcoin main network to issue assets and use the existing Lightning Network to achieve high-speed and cheap asset flow. However, it is still unclear which one will run faster. It can only be said that both are strong competing solutions for the second-layer network on the current Bitcoin main network. Since the concept of Bitcoin ecology broke out, Stacks has always been a highly anticipated role in it.
As the first token issuance project approved by the SEC in history, Stacks can be regarded as one of the hottest Bitcoin ecological protocols at present, both in terms of financing scale and token price performance.
Of course, unlike the previous Taproot Assets and RGB protocols, the Stacks protocol does not issue assets on the Bitcoin blockchain, so as a Bitcoin sidechain, its security is somewhat discounted. But compared with traditional sidechains, Stacks still leverages the security of some Bitcoin mainnets. After all, there are settlement transactions between its block data and the Bitcoin mainnet.
As a star Layer2 project in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the launch of sBTC is currently worth looking forward to. In December last year, Stacks released a white paper stating that it would launch "Stacks Bitcoin" (sBTC), introducing a trust-minimized, non-regulated two-way hook system that allows users to "bridge" BTC from the Bitcoin mainnet to the Stacks layer. In this way, sBTC can be fully used in DeFi, NFT, GameFi, etc. in the Stacks ecosystem, finding new value points for the huge amount of dormant Bitcoin assets.
I believe that many of my friends, like me, will think of RBTC and WBTC when they see sBTC. They also create more liquidity for the Bitcoin deposited in the wallet, but what is worth looking forward to about sBTC is its trust minimization and non-regulation, while RBTC and WBTC have been criticized for being not fully decentralized.
However, the total TVL on Stacks is not large at present, with a total amount of less than 20 million US dollars, of which Alex, known as the first one-stop complete DeFi service platform on Bitcoin, contributes nearly 70%. In addition, the number and types of Dapps on the Stacks ecosystem are not large at present. It is expected that the launch of sBTC will bring a wave of TVL growth. Stacks ecosystem TVL and related Dapps, data source: DeFiLlama RSK is also a side chain of Bitcoin. As a superstar project of ICO in the 2017 bull market, its performance has been mediocre since its launch. The token price began to show some performance after the Bitcoin ecosystem concept became popular.
However, compared to the sidechain Stacks, the compatibility of RSK's virtual machine with EVM is a major advantage , which means that for developers on Ethereum, the entry threshold of the RSK ecosystem is very low.
Currently, RSK is the protocol with the highest TVL in the Bitcoin ecosystem, with a total TVL of nearly US$90 million, of which the lending leader MoneyOnChain accounts for more than half, and the DeFi platform Sovryn has a total TVL of more than 30 million. The total TVL of other Dapps is not very prominent.
Relatively speaking, RSK is one of the most mature and complete Bitcoin ecosystem protocols. According to the official website, there are 47 protocols in the ecosystem, with 3,333 RBTC locked. In addition, it has recently announced the cancellation of the upper limit of 4,000 RBTC, which means that all BTC in circulation are eligible to be locked in RSK in exchange for RBTC. This milestone event is also worth looking forward to. Currently, RBTC and other data are locked in RSK. Source: RSK official website Ordinals Inscription and Brc20 Derivative Protocol In January this year, Bitcoin developer Casey Rodarmor launched the Ordinal protocol, which provided unique numbers for Satoshis and started a craze for Ordinals. Coupled with the explosion of the BRC20 protocol in May, Bitcoin network fees soared several times, and miners naturally made a lot of money. Daily changes in the number of Bitcoin inscriptions minted and the cumulative minting volume, data source: Dune At present, the cumulative minting volume of inscriptions has reached nearly 40 million. Although it has experienced a low period in the previous two months, the recent enthusiasm for inscription minting has shown a trend of recovery, and BRC20 Token has become the focus of speculation again.
Of course, BRC20 Token has been criticized in many ways, especially the complexity of transfers, which will generate a large number of junk transactions for Bitcoin. Therefore, it has been controversial since its birth and has not been well accepted by the community.
At present, new protocols similar to the evolution of BRC20 in the Bitcoin ecosystem are also worth watching:
For example, Atomical and ARC20, another derivative protocol that issues tokens by embedding data on Bitcoin's UTXO, have greatly improved the degree of decentralization compared to Brc20 and are more in line with the Bitcoin community's philosophy. However, the entire protocol is still in its early stages and needs to be continuously improved.
Casey, the founder of Ordinals, proposed a special inscription implementation method for issuing tokens, namely Rune. Subsequently, the first usable protocol Pipe written by the founder of Trac based on this concept was born and quickly gained community hype.
Of course, in addition to these, Ordinals and the BRC20 protocol itself are also continuing to evolve and deserve continued attention. summary As the absolute leader in the crypto market, Bitcoin accounts for more than 50% of the total market value of the entire crypto market. However, the vast majority of circulating Bitcoins are dormant in wallets. Once these dormant Bitcoins are activated, they will inevitably bring huge liquidity and vitality to the market, which is one of the reasons why countless developers are rushing to try the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Although the total number of active developers in the Bitcoin ecosystem is not large at present, with less than 1,000 developers, ranking fourth after Ethereum, Polkadot, and Cosmos , we can see from the changes in developer data that despite the bear market, the decline in developers in the Bitcoin ecosystem is the lowest, indicating that compared with other ecosystems, the Bitcoin ecosystem is more attractive to developers in the current bear market, and the continued popularity of the Bitcoin ecosystem also confirms this. Number of active developers in the top ecosystem, source: developerreport As for how the Bitcoin ecosystem will develop in the future, whether it will truly usher in a summer of flourishing Bitcoin ecosystems such as DeFi, NFT, and GameFi, or whether it will be a short-lived hype, it will take more time to brew and verify. |
