Releasing Bitcoin Layers under the MIT License
At Bitcoin Layers, we are developing risk analysis frameworks for a variety of Bitcoin scaling protocols, ranging from Lightning Network to upcoming sovereign rollups. Earlier this week, we announced a generalized framework for assessing, and defining, Bitcoin scaling protocols. Today, Bitcoin Layers now has a v1 website.
Together with Red Sheehan, I’m excited to share that we are publicly releasing the first version of our website, and the code behind it, under the permissive MIT license. Anyone is welcome to use our code, and risk frameworks, however they see fit.
The Bitcoin ecosystem has seen a renewed sense of energy around offchain scaling protocols. During the Ordinals craze in 2023, many teams were also exploring how to build new types of scaling protocols on top of Bitcoin. Improved bridging technologies, a la BitVM, showed us that optimistic rollups on Bitcoin are possible.
I’ve spent the last few years following the development of validity rollups on Bitcoin. Inspired by the teams building sovereign rollups, I decided to document the space more seriously through the Bitcoin Rollups newsletter and build education materials for Bitcoiners interested in rollups. Eventually, this work, research, and discussion evolved into what would become the first framework for Bitcoin Layers.
Initially, I thought it was going to take a few years until we had pseudo-proofs of concepts of these new types of scaling solutions. But the pace of innovation has been incredible. Seven months ago, I could barely find anything to document. Now I can barely keep up.
While I’ve never been more bullish on Bitcoin, and the protocols working to scale it, I’m conscious that we need a way to analyze this new wave of development, and make it digestible to end users. Others in the ecosystem feel the same. This is why over the last few months, I’ve been frequently asked to build a site similar to L2Beat, dedicated to Bitcoin.
This is why we built Bitcoin Layers. I hope that this work can contribute to the overall assessment of Bitcoin scaling protocols. And while we are building aggressively to produce the best version of Bitcoin Layers, we are also excited to work with other projects in the ecosystem. We’d love to see the information created for Bitcoin Layers supplement other resources dedicated to Bitcoin scaling protocols.
Our immediate next steps for this work are:
- Release initial risk assessments on protocols that are live and in production
- Continue to add new scaling protocols, and supporting infrastructure, to the site
- Further develop our general risk framework
- Develop more granular risk frameworks for specific scaling protocols
- Create and release educational content to support these frameworks
Make UI improvements to the website
If you’d like to support our work, please consider following us on X. If you’d like to contribute to the Bitcoin scaling discussion, join this community telegram chat.
Lastly, thank you to everyone who has supported this project over the last few months. Thank you to those who have engaged in numerous discussions around this topic. Thank you to the L2Beat team for inspiring Bitcoin Layers and giving us a starting point. And, a special thank you to Alexei Zamyatin.
