Layer-2 community BOB has launched its testnet forward of the mainnet going stay in This fall of this 12 months.
Describing itself as a hybrid layer-2, BOB’s purpose 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 introduced in late 2023 by Robin Linus as a method of enabling rollups atop Bitcoin, thus permitting quicker 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bridge harnesses BitVM to permit BTC to be transferred to the rollup and later convey it again in order that it may be withdrawn.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’s going to use precise BTC slightly than a wrapped model of the asset because the gasoline for DeFi companies. Some tasks use a type of wrapped bitcoin to convey BTC’s worth to their ecosystem to be used in DeFi functions, such as Stacks with its sBTC token.
“Simply as ETH stays ‘ETH’ on Ethereum rollups like Optimism and Arbitrum, BTC on BOB stays native and easily known as ‘BTC’,” BOB mentioned in an announcement shared with CoinDesk on Wednesday.
Rollups corresponding 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 companies who will probably be working nodes on the BitVM bridge, corresponding to staking builders P2P.org and Lombard, DeFi platform Solv Protocol, crypto enterprise capitalists RockawayX and digital asset supervisor Amber Group.