Controversy Arises Over Building Sovereign Rollups on the Bitcoin Network

Recently, the Bitcoin community and the Ethereum community have engaged in intense discussions about the feasibility of building a sovereign Rollup on the Bitcoin network. This idea was initially proposed by a well-known Bitcoin supporter, which subsequently attracted widespread attention.

Rollkit, as a modular Rollup framework, announces support for establishing sovereign Rollups based on the Bitcoin network. This solution aims to allow Rollups to inherit the data availability and security guarantees of Bitcoin. Theoretically, this not only expands the application scope of Rollups but may also promote the formation of a healthy block space fee market within the Bitcoin network, thereby achieving a more sustainable security budget.

In February 2023, the Bitcoin network saw the largest block in history, approximately 4MB in size. This is mainly due to the Ordinals protocol, which utilizes the Taproot upgrade to record NFT image data on-chain. The Taproot upgrade significantly increased the amount of data that can be written in a single Bitcoin transaction, from 80 bytes to nearly 4MB. This opened up the possibility of publishing large amounts of data on the Bitcoin network.

Rollkit enables developers to choose Bitcoin as the data availability and consensus layer by implementing a Bitcoin data availability module. In this model, the sovereign Rollup manages its own execution and settlement while delegating consensus and data availability tasks to the Bitcoin network.

To read and write data on the Bitcoin network, Rollkit has developed a Go language package called bitcoin-da, which provides a reader-writer interface for Bitcoin. This package can be reused by any project that wishes to read and write data on Bitcoin. Rollkit's modular design allows developers to add new data availability layers by implementing specific methods.

To test the integration effect, Rollkit ran a sovereign Rollup demo based on EVM on the local Bitcoin test network. This demo showcases the possibility of running smart contracts on the Bitcoin network.

However, this idea has also sparked controversy. Some traditional Bitcoin supporters believe that this could further occupy the already limited Bitcoin block space, exacerbating network congestion.

Stanford University professor David Tse pointed out that even with a 4MB block, the total throughput of the Bitcoin network is less than 56 kbits per second, and there is limited space for directly storing data.

Sreeram Kannan, the founder of Eigenlayer, provided a detailed analysis of the security attributes of this sovereign Rollup. He believes that while this scheme can inherit certain security features from the Bitcoin network, it cannot achieve secure asset cross-chain with the Bitcoin network. This design may be suitable for constructing NFTs or other assets based on the Bitcoin network, but it is not suitable for the secure transmission and use of BTC.

Overall, sovereign Rollups based on the Bitcoin network retain the security of the Bitcoin network for locally issued assets (such as new NFTs or stablecoins), but it is difficult to establish a secure cross-chain connection with the Bitcoin network. The practicality and performance of this technical solution are still under debate and require further discussion and verification.