It's all vibes bro

I’m trying out a quick newsletter-type thing on newer Bitcoin sidechains. It's a really short piece where I’ll share my opinion on some projects.

It’s a bit weird that I’m staking my reputation on this space somewhat succeeding (I mean if it’s all a scam, we’re kind of fucked right?). But fuck it, here are some of my latest thoughts on the space:

BOB’s GTM playbook is interesting. Is bit2 following suit?

I was extremely skeptical of BOB at first. Now I secretly think their go-to-market strategy is an interesting one 🤫

They recently added a gateway (atomic swaps between Bitcoin and BOB) and it’s a massive UX improvement. Ever try to bridge from Bitcoin to BOB? It’s a nightmare. This is certainly a level up.

And with a centralized sequencer, BOB can provide a much better UX than most competitors. Slap on sequencer merge-mining, it’d become just as Bitcoin-aligned as anything in production today. Ethereum DA is good, they’re adding fraud proofs, etc, etc, etc.

If they fix the exit window issue (this is a big effing problem), there’s an argument they'd as secure as any federated sidechain.

They’ve got about 943~ BTC locked in the chain and have only been live for a couple of months. The BOB gateway let’s users swap BTC from the mainchain directly into tBTC (a more trust-minimized BTC synthetic on Ethereum), so perhaps more users are on the way. It’ll be interesting to see how adoption plays out on a 12-18 month time frame.

Let’s face it. There’s some demand for these more Bitcoin-centric, sidechain-like, dunno-what-to-call them, chains. Ethereum RaaS providers help these things get to market quickly.

So the playbook seems to be a good one. Who else is following suit?

Bit2: Another Ethereum rollup that is looking to deploy a Bitcoin-centric strategy similar to BOB. They’re launching with wBTC as its gas token. Currently in a devnet phase with mainnet on the roadmap for late 2024. Fun fact: They’re deploying with Conduit, the same RaaS provider as BOB.

Tl;dr: BOB is building the playbook for UX abstraction and “progressive Bitcoin alignment”. It’ll be interesting to see if bit2 follows the same path with their launch strategy and research.

Willem could’ve sold the future

Botanix is building an EVM Bitcoin sidechain. They’ll launch initially as a federation, and will integrate a decentralized multi-sig mechanism (Spiderchain) overtime. You all know that though. I’m shouting them out for keeping a level head during all the madness. Willem Schroe (CEO) and Zack Voell (Director of Comms) both appeared on the What Bitcoin Did podcast to chat about the EVM coming to Bitcoin. They could’ve used that whole episode to shill their decentralized sidechain approach, but they instead advocated for these developments on Bitcoin and explained the tradeoffs.

Did they bring up their design? Mhm. But they also acknowledged their path of progressive decentralization and were honest about the tradeoffs.

They had a chance to handwave everything away and just talk about the end state. They instead outlined the journey to get there. It's a refreshing take amongst all the bullshit marketing headlines.

Read this Bitcoin Magazine article from Willem Schroe for more insights on building in this design space.

Astra… A Stargaze L2 supporting native Bitcoin yield?

Astra is launching as an L2 on top of the Stargaze L1. Stargaze is a Proof-of-Stake blockchain that is known for its NFT applications. They’ll be using Celestia for DA, which places them within the modular ecosystem.

In the announcement, they highlighted that users will be able to earn yield on Bitcoin restaking assets and fees from the Ordinals marketplace. I think there will be a fair few bitcoin-aligned chains from the Celestia ecosystem. They’ve been covering the space for a minute and Rollkit, a sovereign rollup development framework supported by the Celestia ecosystem, launched the first-ever sovereign rollup on Bitcoin.

A lot of “Bitcoin L2” chains that have launched say they’re going to use Celestia for DA… I personally think most of them are scams, so I’m skeptical of what’s ahead. But Stargaze has a decent reputation and some top-tier NFT collections. And, launching with Rollkit’s framework adds some legitimacy. Let’s see where these Astra “bitcoin integrations” go. It’ll be an interesting one to follow.