Burak, a Bitcoin Lightning developer/hacker, is developing a new Bitcoin layer-2 known as Brollups, designed to bring more DeFi use cases to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin developer “Burak,” who also developed Ark Protocol, a Lightning Network competitor, last year, has introduced “Brollups.”
According to Burak, Brollup is a layer-2 that provides a Bitcoin-native roll-up design, which enables the aggregation of transactions without the necessity of hard forking Bitcoin or issuing a non-Bitcoin token.
In a Medium post on June 21, Burak stated that Brollups is currently in the “design phase.” He informed Cointelegraph that a signet (testnet) deployment may be in the works later this year.
Burak stated that Brollups would 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 loopholes are “integrated into Bitcoin and function as a payable construct natively with Bitcoin.”
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 garnered significant praise from the Bitcoin community for devising the solution without the necessity of hard forking Bitcoin or creating a new token.
Establishing a Competitor for Lightning Network
Using a 998-of-999 multisignature Taproot transaction, Burak exploited the Lightning Network in October 2022. 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.
Casey Rodarmor introduced the Ordinals protocol in January 2023, following which only a handful of transactions implemented the Taproot upgrade.
Taproot transactions accounted for a record 46.4% of all Bitcoin transactions in December 2023; however, this figure has since decreased to 30% this month, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard from Data Always.
Among the other Bitcoin scaling initiatives emphasizing the integration of DeFi functionality into Bitcoin are Spiderchain and Drivechain.
In May 2022, Burak introduced Ark, a Bitcoin layer-2 solution that prioritizes payments by eliminating the necessity for payment channels.
