Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal

the @bitcoinlayers shared alt. unbothered, moisturized, in our lanes, and getting rugged by custodians

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

does this mean cardano is a bitcoin L2 now

[Bitcoin Layers @BitcoinLayers]

Happy Birthday to me 🎉 To celebrate, an update from @januszg_

—

The Bitcoin Layers project is effectively being run by volunteers. Our team is building an app that requires our full attention and we simply don’t have the bandwidth (or funds) to maintain it full-time or part-time consistently.

The current core contributor set remains myself, Red, and Mike. But I’ve noticed that our contributions lessen every week as we work on new products. Still:

- For token requests to be added to the database, ping @redvelvetzip
- For research requests, ping me
- For UI tweaks, ping @bolander72
- Or just join our TG chat and request stuff there

But note that it’s going to take longer for us to get to things.

I’m still going to contribute to it regularly because I care about it (cringe, I know). Some of the claims made in the space are honestly quite unhinged, so it’s good to have something that acts as a watchdog over this new category.

But if you don’t trust me, or my opinions (which are 100% infallible may I add), there are a couple of options:

- Contribute to it. Everything is open-source and you can submit a PR today (it will take us time to review, however)
- Fork it and create your own version. Try to monetize it and succeed where we didn’t
- Work with us on creating a grants pool where we can fund independent researchers & devs
- Independently fund researchers to work on the site yourself & without our permission
- We’re open to hearing more ideas

We’re going to experiment with some other ideas to generate some funds for the project. Even if these ideas pan out, most of the profits will go into a grants pool to fund other contributors interested in the project. We may take some to fund infra costs that we incur for maintaining the site and database.

This doesn’t mean Bitcoin Layers is sunsetting. Or it’ll never be worked on again. Hell, I've done like 6 projects reviews the past two weeks. We're just letting you all know that things just may be a little slower 🙂

For what it's worth, we never made any money on Bitcoin Layers.

Thanks for your support.

- Janusz

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

recently saw that a project was considering adding BTC support for their app

i sent them a tl;dr on the security properties related to BTC wrappers. here's what was covered:

- custodian trust model: basically, who custodies the funds backing the BTC derivative asset
- participation: can you as an application/protocol team participate as a signer in the BTC wrapper's protocol? (if you want obviously)
- steps to integrate: how do you get the wrapper to your application or protocol? for example, if i'm deploying an app on arbitrum, i don't need to build a custom bridge between ethereum and arbitrum for tBTC (because it exists). if i deployed on scroll, i'd need to build this if i wanted to exclusively use tBTC
- external risk: something not always discussed is external risks like jurisdiction, sanctions lists, etc. if you leverage cbBTC for your app, there's some implied risk related to US govt

i also included @bitcoinlayers reviews if they we're available

the answer on "which wrapper should i use" is always:

it depends

people trying to build large anonymity sets might look support the most accessible asset on their network. the more volume in the protocol, the better the privacy set. for example, tornado cash supports wBTC on ethereum

some teams may prefer distributed trust models. others may be comfortable with custodial set ups due to relationships they have with said custodians

something we're considering with @lemondropfi is how can we participate in the security of the peg (if we deploy on a sidesystem). if we direct our users somewhere, we'd want to additionally play a role in ensuring the custodians don't steal the money

these considerations are most useful for teams building on ethereum and other alt l1s/rollups. for teams just looking to build an app from scratch, there's considerations outside of this. there are new styles of networks that offer bitcoin-style applications that aren't full-on blockchains.

e.g. if you're building an ordinals trading app, an evm-style blockchain might not make much sense. something like Ark or Spark would likely be a better choice and the risk profile is much different from a custodial bridge

if anyone is building in ethereum or other L1s and wants to add BTC support, feel free to ping @januszg_ a message. can talk about the tradeoffs for a number of these wrappers

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

@godfred_xcuz the federation

read the tweet

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

sBTC is not non-custodial BTC

a 10/14 federation custody the bitcoin backing sBTC

when using sBTC, you are not using BTC. you're using an IOU

if the federation rug you, you still hold sBTC. it'd just be worthless

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

@redvelvetzip @hemi_xyz @ibtcnetwork @AkiBalogh @exSatNetwork thanks

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

is this iBTC token minted on @hemi_xyz from the @ibtcnetwork team?

cc @AkiBalogh

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

@0x_orkun it's me

im launching an bitvm-based arbitrum l3 using your code

investors, dm's are open

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

yo @BTC_OS add a couple of expletives to the marketing materials and we'll let it slide

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

fiamma's marketing is awesome im not even mad that they say trustless

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

"let's copy a list of addresses on @mempool, add up their amounts, and mint a corresponding amount of erc20s on ethereum. then we'll tell people it's backed by bitcoin"

i doubt coinbase did this but there's no way to prove otherwise

[Coinbase 🛡️ @coinbase]

Proof of Reserves for cbBTC is now live.

Learn more. ↓

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

worth saying a few things

- it's highly unlikely that a honest-majority federation, such as sBTC or Liquid, gets hacked/breaks/rugs
- the risk related to these assets compound when it's not native BTC backing the wrapper
- you don't need blockchains for every use case (e.g. statechains & arks)
- a lot of people are working on BitVM to improve this, but comes with tradeoffs (things like rollups may not need honest majority)

the frustration comes from projects claiming that their honest majority federation is trust minimized when in practice it's no different than Liquid which has been live for 7 years

to this point, bitcoin season 2 has driven users to newer custodial assets and chains with extremely high trust assumptions

new players that are on mainnet have higher trust assumptions than legacy players which causes a distrust from ppl who look at these things closely

still, this year could present some improvements to current state. and, projects are starting to launch with better federation designs and have improved transparency compared to last year

things are getting better, but that does not change the fact that everything still is an honest majority and most teams use fancy words to confuse their users of what's actually going on in the backend

if projects have 1k+ in TVL and don't have public operator sets, distributed federations, etc., consider where the TVL is coming from

is simply converted over from wBTC? is it custodians "allocating" user funds to projects' numbers? etc

adoption of newer bitcoin products is purely token drop speculation. this isn't bad, but it is not the vision being laid out in marketing materials, pitch decks, and more

gm

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

gm

PumpBTC review is now live on @BitcoinLayers. https://t.co/CPvwGnLJN2

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

"this is raw engineering power in a bottle. im gonna be cracked out writing code all week" - @redvelvetzip

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

number of singers doesn't necessarily reflect security blah blah blah

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

fun fact

stacks sBTC isn't even the most distributed sBTC on the market

@SideProtocol's sBTC has 20 signers participating in its two-way peg

Stacks' sBTC has 14

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

gm

merlin's MBTC review is now live on @BitcoinLayers. https://t.co/Fx3O3faWvJ

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

@JacobPPhillips how many individual entities are participating right now? can you provide a number?

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

It's worth noting that Lombard's security consortium signers are not public so it could be one entity, 2 entities, etc., participating in the set up

[Alice, The Bitcoin Reply Gal @BitcoinReplyGal]

Consortium contract https://t.co/BARUNLKW1x

[HeroGamer⚡ @herogamer21btc]

Janusz is currently the only person writing research for @BitcoinLayers right now. If you want to give him a hand, join our TG group to learn how you can contribute.