The Rollkit development team has announced that Bitcoin has been integrated as a means of supreme rollups for storing and retrieving data. The developers have stated that it is now possible to run the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on Bitcoin as a superb rollup. However, some Ethereum supporters have expressed displeasure with the technology being referred to as a rollup, and have suggested that the team should avoid using the term.
Rollkit’s modular framework for rollups and its potential impact on the blockchain industry
March 5, 2023, developers announced a new development that claims it is now possible to produce superb rollups to store and retrieve data using the Bitcoin blockchain. The team behind the project are Rollkit developers, who detailed that the technology opens up more possibilities for rollups and can help create a better blockchain fee market on Bitcoin. To make this possible, the Rollkit team used Taproot transactions to read and write data on Bitcoin and created the “bitcoin-da” package to provide the necessary interface. They also implemented the “SubmitBlock” and “RetrieveBlocks” functions for Rollkit to interact with Bitcoin.
“Rollkit is a modular framework for rollups that provides interfaces for plugging in different components, such as data availability layers,” explained the Rollkit development team. “The newest addition is an early research implementation of a module that allows a Rollkit rollup to use Bitcoin for data availability.” The software programmers too noted that the Ordinal inscription trend on Bitcoin showed the team the possibilities, and they followed a similar design process. “At its core, all that was needed were two functions: one to submit summary blocks and another to retrieve them,” the Rollkit developers said.
The controversy surrounding Rollkit’s integration of Bitcoin for sovereign rollups
Following the announcement by Rollkit developers, a number of Ethereum supporters criticized the team for describing the process as a rollup. ETH supporter Ryan Berckmans so: “A ‘supreme rollup on Bitcoin’ is actually an alt L1 that stores its block data on Bitcoin. It’s not a true rollup or a true L2. [In my opinion]the best way for us to fight back against these lies is to build an Ethereum zk L2 that puts its data on Bitcoin.”
Another person insisted, “Just because you have data availability doesn’t make it a summary.” The founder of Intermediate, Alexei Zamyatin, also criticized Rollkit’s announcement. “Please, read this newspaper,” Zamyatin wrote. “You inherit *nothing* of Bitcoin’s security. Data availability – OK, but honestly, it’s been used since 2012. The whole post describes ‘I’m writing some data to Bitcoin’ with fancy buzzwords,” Zamyatin added.
The Rollkit developers have released a demo video on Youtube of the technology in action. The team has also written an extensive blog post describing how it works. “As we move towards a future where sovereign communities will form around different applications, asking them to incur the high costs and overheads of deploying a layer 1 blockchain to be sovereign is not sustainable,” the Rollkit blog post concludes . “Sovereign rollups fix this by making it possible to deploy a sovereign chain that inherits the data availability and consensus of another layer 1 chain like Bitcoin.”
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Alexei Zamyatin, Bitcoin, bitcoin-da package, Blockchain, blockspace fee market, BTC supporters, comprehensive blog post, Consensus, data availability, data availability layer, demo video, ETH supporters, ETH supporter, Ethereum Virtual Machine, EVM, Interlay, L1 , L2, Layer 1 Chain, Modular Framework, Ordinal Inscription Trend, RetrieveBlocks, Rollkit, Rollkit Bitcoin, Ryan Berckmans, Security, Software Developers, Sovereign Communities, Sovereign Rollups, SubmitBlock, Taproot Transactions, Technology, YouTube, zk L2
What do you think about the use of Bitcoin as a means of sovereign rollups? Do you think it has the potential to create a better market for Bitcoin blockchain fees, or do you agree with critics that it is not a real roll-up? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Jamie Redman
Jamie Redman is the news editor at Bitcoin.com News and a financial technology journalist living in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He has a passion for Bitcoin, open source and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written more than 6,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News about the disruptive protocols emerging today.
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