Bitcoin Hacker Unveils Layer 2 Brollups

According to the Bitcoin developer, brollups can accommodate over 90% of decentralized finance use cases, including token orders on DEXs and NFT sales.

The Bitcoin developer, renowned for exploiting a bug in the Lightning Network, which resulted in an emergency update in 2022, is currently developing a new Bitcoin layer 2 designed to introduce more decentralized financing use cases to Bitcoin.

“Brollups” has been introduced by Bitcoin developer “Burak,” who also developed a Lightning Network competitor known as Ark Protocol last year.

Burak clarified that Brollup is a layer 2 that provides a Bitcoin-native roll-up design, enabling the aggregation of transactions without the need to be challenging forking Bitcoin or issuing a non-Bitcoin token.

Brollups is still in the “design phase,” as Burak noted in the Medium post on June 21. He informed Cointelegraph that a signet (testnet) deployment may be in the works later this year.

Burak stated that Brollups will endeavor to accommodate over 90% of DeFi use cases upon its launch.

“Whether it’s listing an NFT for sale in exchange for Bitcoin where the buyer pays with Bitcoin upon execution, or placing a token sell order on a decentralized exchange, [all of this is] atomically executed, verifiable, scalable, and enforceable on Bitcoin.”

Burak stated that “brollups are deeply embedded in Bitcoin and function natively as a payable construct.”

The protocol will be liquidity-provided by “operators,” who will advance the rollup state by chaining Bitcoin transactions at “regular intervals.” These operators will manage brollups.

The Bitcoin Virtual Machine will execute transactions.

Burak was commended by the Bitcoin community for his ability to develop the solution without the necessity of hard forking Bitcoin or creating a new token.

From hacking the Lightning Network to building a scaling competitor

Burak successfully exploited the Lightning Network in October 2022 by executing a 998-of-999 multi-signature Taproot transaction.

Burak’s actions temporarily lost coordination among all nodes, necessitating an emergency update for Lightning Network node operators.

The transaction, which resulted in a mere $5 transaction fee, did not involve any theft of funds. However, according to industry experts at the time, it underscored an unintended consequence of the Taproot upgrade.

The Taproot enhancement was utilized in a minimal number of transactions until January 2023, when Casey Rodarmor introduced the Ordinals protocol.

In December 2023, Taproot transactions accounted for 46.4% of all Bitcoin transactions. However, this figure has since decreased to 30% this month, as indicated by a Dune Analytics dashboard from Data Always.

Drivechain and the Spiderchain are among the other Bitcoin scaling initiatives integrating DeFi functionality into Bitcoin.

Ark, a Bitcoin layer 2 solution focused predominantly on payments, was launched by Burak in May 2022. This solution eliminates the necessity for payment channels.