Layer-2 community BOB has launched its testnet forward of the mainnet going reside in This fall of this yr.
Describing itself as a hybrid layer-2, BOB’s intention is to mix Bitcoin’s safety and reserves with Ethereum’s programmability utilizing the BitVM computing paradigm to create a decentralized finance (DeFi) hub.
BitVM was launched in late 2023 by Robin Linus as a way of enabling rollups atop Bitcoin, thus permitting sooner and cheaper transactions with out compromising the community’s safety.
BOB’s bridge harnesses BitVM to permit BTC to be transferred to the rollup and later convey it again in order that it may be withdrawn.
Central to BOB’s ethos is that it’ll use precise BTC relatively than a wrapped model of the asset because the gas for DeFi providers. Some tasks use a type of wrapped bitcoin to convey BTC’s worth to their ecosystem to be used in DeFi functions, similar to Stacks with its sBTC token.
“Simply as ETH stays ‘ETH’ on Ethereum rollups like Optimism and Arbitrum, BTC on BOB stays native and easily referred to as ‘BTC’,” BOB stated in an announcement shared with CoinDesk on Wednesday.
Rollups similar to Arbitrum bundles transactions which it then settles on Ethereum on a budget, utilizing fraud proofs to make sure their correctness. BOB says it’s doing one thing akin to this on Bitcoin.
Co-founder Alexei Zamyatin described this as a “clear distinction,” between its providing and wrapped variations of BTC, in a Telegram message to CoinDesk.
The testnet debuts with help from a bunch of main crypto corporations who will likely be working nodes on the BitVM bridge, similar to staking builders P2P.org and Lombard, DeFi platform Solv Protocol, crypto enterprise capitalists RockawayX and digital asset supervisor Amber Group.
