Minting tBTC on Ethereum's mainnet is a gas-heavy process. It involves a BLS-based random beacon π and cross-chain SPV proofs π§βπ¬ so you don't need to trust a central party for RNG or minting (!!!). Awesome, but expensive in terms of gas / blockspace π°π₯
On top of that, the price of gas is through the roof thanks to our degenerate finance friends π€
Good for Ethereum security, but suddenly smaller tBTC mints could be priced out of the market.
What's a new project to do? We've been discussing adding larger lot sizes shortly after launch (eg 10 BTC), but at the end of the day smaller users are still priced out.
Enter Lightning.
@corolari 's work here adapts submarine swaps to allow arbitrary amounts to move bi-directionally from BTC <-> TBTC.
Bitcoiners will be able to move cheaply from BTC's L2 to Ethereum and back, making this the perfect on and off ramp for BTC in DeFi π₯
The work is early, and there are still open questions around node selection and griefing. Looking forward to other thoughts @gakonst@_charlienoyes@_prestwich - let's harden this thing and take it to mainnet!
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So, @MakerDAO is considering delisting WBTC, which makes up ~10% of DAI's backing.
1/
2/ Since 2019, I've been working on a decentralized alternative to WBTC β tBTC.
It's gone through tweaks and improvements over the years, balancing security and flexibility.
3/ Today, tBTC is...
πββοΈ An easy to use, permissionless bridge
π Supported on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, & Solana, with more to come
π Backed by a decentralized network of custodians @TheTNetwork
2/ Since then, MM has launched Swap, an in-wallet trading service. Today, theyβre earning ~$10M a month in fees, charging each user 0.75-1% per swap π³
1/ Recently, a couple @keep_project and @nucypher community members reached out to broker a call. Two whirlwind weeks later, and the teams are putting a joint proposal in front of our communities.
The proposal? To join forces in the first on-chain protocol hard merge.
2/ Whatβs a hard merge?
@tbitls coined the term to describe two protocols merging into a third. Itβs sort of like a hard spoon, but with multiple protocols coming together.
Both NuCypher and Keep are threshold cryptography networks. Both have off-chain actors that can custody parts of secrets and compute over them, giving on-chain contracts super powers.
Both communities value censorship resistance, privacy, and security β first.
2/ As far as I know, this release is the first permissionless, censorship-resistant Bitcoin bridge on Ethereum. Anyone can mint $tBTC by connecting to the Bitcoin and Ethereum chains, and no one can censor transactions or redemptions.
3/ Of course, censorship-resistance is on a spectrum. Today, there are ~67 signers powering the bridge- not 1000s. That number is increasing every hour, and I hope we'll see 500+ signers online before the end of the year.
What does a "fair launch" mean when the same players are showing up to mine liquidity, over and over? Fair to whom?
If a vanilla SHA-256 coin is launched and it accrues some modest value, it's a freebie for existing Bitcoin miners. The only real cost is the opportunity of the hashpower, but for them it's a drop in the bucket
Fair launches today in DeFi are a subsidy for whale LPs. A strong launch should bootstrap a new community or extend an existing one, not enrich the same 5 aggro DeFi hedge funds.
I've been thinking about "blind" staking β staking mechanisms that allow stakers to retain some amount of privacy.
It's a fun problem. Stakers deposit funds into some sort of anonymity pool. Stakers then prove they are in the pool as of some height, and are "eligible" for whatever the staking enables.
There's a wide pool design space. In a system like @keep_project, the funds don't need to be able to be transferred within the pool. They do, however, need to able to be burned by objective rules enforced across the pool.