Soft-Fork/Covenant Dependent Layer 2 Review - Report
Bitcoin developer Peter Todd compiled a comprehensive overview of soft-fork and covenant-dependent layer 2 proposals, including Ark, LN-Symmetry, Validity Rollups, BitVM, CTV, SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT, LNHANCE, OP_TXHASH, OP_CAT, Consensus Cleanup, and others.
- On-chain wallets map each economic transaction to one blockchain transaction. Aggregations, coinjoin, and cut-through payments may alter this slightly, but it's mostly accurate, writes the developer.
"Our goal here is to do an overview of all these proposals, figure out what technical patterns they share, figure out what kinds of new opcodes and other soft fork upgrades they need to function, and create a comparison table of how all the parts fit together."
- Lightning enables infinite economic transactions within a single channel linked to one UTXO by collapsing the "time" dimension of transactions. However, a single UTXO per user isn't sufficient for ultimate scaling. Proposals aim to let multiple users share one UTXO, further collapsing the "space" dimension.
"Along the way we’ll also define what an L2 protocol actually is, what kind of scaling Lightning is already capable of, and get an understanding of what improvements we need to do to mempools to achieve all this."
- "Thanks goes to Fulgur Ventures for sponsoring this research. They had no editorial control over the contents of this post and did not review it prior to publication. Thanks also goes to Daniela Brozzoni, Sarah Cox, and others for pre-publication review," added the developer.
"My personal recommendation: do a consensus cleanup soft-fork, followed by CTV," writes Peter Todd.
Read the full report here.
