The Rollkit development team announced that Sovereign Rollup has integrated Bitcoin as a means to store and retrieve data. The developers stated that it is now possible to run Ethereum Virtual Machines (EVMs) on Bitcoin as Sovereign Rollup. However, some Ethereum supporters have expressed dissatisfaction with the technology being referred to as a rollup, suggesting that the team should avoid using the term.
Rollkit’s modular framework for rollups and its potential impact on the blockchain industry
On March 5, 2023, developersannounced a new developmentthat they claim has made it possible to produce a sovereign rollup for storing and retrieving data using the bitcoin blockchain. The team behind the project is Rollkit developers, who detailed that the technology will expand the possibilities for rollups and create a better block space fee market on Bitcoin. To accomplish this, the Rollkit team created the “bitcoin-da” package to read and write data on Bitcoin using Taproot transactions and provide the necessary interfaces. We also implemented the “SubmitBlock” and “RetrieveBlocks” functions for Rollkit to interact with Bitcoin.
“Rollkit is a modular framework for rollups and provides an interface to plug in different components like a data availability layer.” explained the Rollkit development team.” The latest addition is an early research implementation of a module that will allow Rollkit rollups to use bitcoin for data availability.” The software programmer alsonotedthat Bitcoin’s Ordinal nameplate trend showed the team the potential, and said they followed a similar design process.” At its core, we needed two things: the ability to submit rollup blocks and the ability to retrieve them.”said the Rollkit developers.
Controversy over Rollkit’s integration of bitcoin for sovereign rollups
Following the announcement from Rollkit developers, many Ethereum supporters criticized the team for describing the process as a roll-up. ETHsupporter Ryan Berkmanssaid: “A ‘sovereign rollup on bitcoin’ is actually an ortho L1 that stores block data on bitcoin. It is neither a real rollup nor a real L2. The best way [in my opinion] for us to fight back against these lies is to build an ethereum zk L2 that puts data on bitcoin.”
Anotherclaimed, “The availability of data does not make it a roll-up.” He is the founder ofInterlay” Alexei Zamyatin also criticized the roll kit announcement.” Pls ser, read this paper” and Zamyatinwrites. “I inherited *nothing* of bitcoin security. Data availability – OK, but honestly, that’s what has been used since 2012. The whole post describes in fancy buzzwords ‘I write some data to bitcoin,'” Zamyatin added.
Rollkit’s developers have published a demo video (50) on Youtube showing the technology in action. They have also written a comprehensive blog post (52) (53) on how it works. Rollkit’s blog post concludes, “It is not sustainable to ask people to bear the high cost and overhead of deploying a layer 1 blockchain in order to become sovereign, heading into a future where sovereign communities are formed around a variety of applications.” “Sovereign Rollupsolves this by enabling the deployment of sovereign chains that inherit the data availability and consensus of other layer 1 chains such as Bitcoin.”
What do you think about using bitcoin as a means of sovereign rollup? Do you think it has the potential to better the bitcoin block space fee market or do you agree with the critics that it is not a true roll-up? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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