Project Introduction
@Built on Bob BOB ("Built on Bitcoin") is a new BTC L2 stack with full EVM compatibility, inheriting Bitcoin PoW security through a new merged mining protocol. BOB supports the Bitcoin stack, including Ordinals, Lightning, and Nostr, backed by cross-chain light clients, a universal Bitcoin smart contract SDK, and Rust zkVM. Additionally, BOB connects to Ethereum as an OP stack aggregator, providing one-click local access to USDC, USDT, ETH, and all other ERC20 tokens as well as major exchanges.
Project Investment
Dominik Harz is the co-founder and CTO of Interlay and BOB. Alexei Zamyatin is the co-founder of Interlay and BOB, previously a researcher at SBA Research. He is a PhD student at the Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering Center at Imperial College London, focusing his research on blockchain security and interoperability. In March 2024, they secured $10 million in funding, led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Bankless Ventures, Mechanism Capital, CMS Holdings, Alliance DAO, Zee Prime Capital, IOSG Ventures, Hypersphere Ventures, UTXO Management, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Nexo, RockawayX, DFG, Daedalus, @Built on Bob venture capital, Nix Ventures, Antafor Ventures, Via BTC Capital, Module Capital, Asymmetric, Domo, Dan Holdings, and Lucky Friday.
Project Advantages
Bitcoin Security: BOB allows for the inheritance of Bitcoin PoW security, with a long-term goal of achieving optimistic aggregation on Bitcoin L1 through on-chain fraud proofs using mechanisms like BitVM.
Supports Bitcoin Stack: BOB supports the existing Bitcoin technology stack, including Ordinals, Lightning, and Nostr, backed by cross-chain light clients, a universal Bitcoin smart contract SDK, and Rust zkVM.
EVM Smart Contracts: BOB's smart contracts are powered by EVM, ensuring full compatibility with top-tier infrastructure and tools.
ETH Aggregation Support: BOB supports aggregation to Ethereum as an OP stack, unlocking Bitcoin use cases for advanced web3 users. In this way, BOB benefits from native support for all ERC20 tokens (including USDC, USDT, ETH), gaining DeFi liquidity and easy entry and exit from major exchanges and institutional platforms.
Project Evaluation
As a base layer, BOB can utilize any EVM rollup or chain. Initially, BOB launched on the OP stack, including upcoming ZK improvements from RiscZero, and can aggregate to Ethereum for one-click onboarding of users, assets, and liquidity. Furthermore, BOB can inherit Bitcoin's security through a novel merged mining protocol (Bitcoin re-staking). BOB's ultimate goal is to settle directly on Bitcoin L1. While we believe full state validation will occur through ZK rollups in the long term, Bitcoin is unlikely to support ZK validators in the near future. Therefore, the best current design is optimistic aggregation, leveraging on-chain anti-fraud features through mechanisms like BitVM.
