Since entering June, the price of Bitcoin has been rising steadily, and once again hit the $70,000 mark. At the time of writing, it has already reached $71,000. As for whether it can stand firm, we need to continue to observe the US non-farm data, CPI data and the direction of the Federal Reserve meeting in mid-month. However, today we are not focusing on the trend of Bitcoin, but on the star project that is devoted to the construction of Bitcoin ecological infrastructure - Zulu Network.
At the end of May, the Zulu Network team announced that it would open source its ZKP verification code based on Bitcoin Script. So far, Zulu Network has not only become the first startup project in the Bitcoin L2 track to use a dual-architecture solution to solve a series of problems in the Bitcoin network, but also the first team to open source ZKP verification codes including mainstream algorithms such as Groth16 and FFlonk.
Therefore, after the Zulu Network team announced this major technological advancement on its official Twitter account, it quickly received praise from @robin_linus. The Zulu Network team once again made a milestone contribution to the construction of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Who is Robin Linus? What is BitVM?
For many web 3 users who don’t pay much attention to the development of Bitcoin’s underlying ecosystem, Robin Linus and his BitVM may not be as well-known as Ethereum and Vitalik Buterin. But if you are a player who has been paying attention to new things in Bitcoin in the past year, such as inscriptions and runes, you should be familiar with Robin Linus.
Robin Linus is an influential developer in the field of cryptography and blockchain technology. He has made great contributions to many projects, such as the well-known privacy protection projects SecureDrop and Track This, as well as the aforementioned Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). In addition, Robin Linus is also deeply involved in multiple Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), which include optimization of the Bitcoin protocol, introduction of new features, and improvement of transaction efficiency.
As for BitVM, as the name suggests, it is easy to associate it with EVM. So are the two products of the same attribute? In fact, it is not a big problem to think so for the convenience of understanding. We know that it is difficult for Bitcoin native scripts to have Turing completeness. BitVM is a computing paradigm created to make up for this deficiency of Bitcoin native scripts. Using BitVM does not require changing the consensus rules of the Bitcoin network. At the same time, it can greatly improve the transaction efficiency and scalability of the native network, creating conditions for the further prosperity of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The core developer of BitVM is Robin Linus. In the developer community, Robin Linus is praised for promoting technological transparency and open source spirit. He believes that technological innovation should serve the public and is committed to promoting technological progress in an open and transparent manner. Because of this, when he retweeted the technical progress of the Zulu Network team, it attracted widespread attention and discussion. Of course, from another perspective, Robin Linus paid attention to the contribution made by the Zulu Network team to the community, not only because of the important value of the open source code itself, but also because the Zulu team's open source, open, and innovative spirit is highly consistent with the pursuit of web 3 users including Robin Linus.
What is the value of the open source code of the Zulu Network team?
If Robin Linus's leading and open-sourcing of BitVM was the first step in the Bitcoin L2 era, then the open-sourcing of the ZKP verification code implemented by the Zulu Network team on Bitcoin Script can be deservedly called an important second step, which is expected to promote the true implementation of the Bitcoin L2 era.
Specifically, we can focus on the value that the Zulu Network team's open source code contributes to the Bitcoin ecosystem from the following aspects:
First, it promotes the development of Bitcoin smart contracts. Bitcoin's native scripting language is relatively simple and has limited functionality. By implementing ZKP verification, the Zulu Network team has added powerful new features to Bitcoin Script, enabling it to support more complex smart contracts. This technological advancement makes it possible to implement more complex smart contracts on the Bitcoin network, such as financial contracts that require privacy protection, decentralized identity authentication, and more complex decentralized applications (DApps).
Second, it strengthens the privacy protection of the Bitcoin network. ZKP verification, also known as zero-knowledge proof, is a cryptographic technology that allows the prover to prove to the verifier that a certain information is true without revealing any other information. Introducing ZKP in the Bitcoin network can greatly enhance the privacy protection of transactions.
Third, it improves the security and scalability of transactions. ZKP can be used to verify the legitimacy of transactions without revealing transaction details, thereby reducing the possibility of attackers obtaining useful information, which undoubtedly helps to improve the overall security of the Bitcoin network. In addition, through ZKP, some complex transaction verification logic can be processed off-chain, and only the necessary verification results are submitted to the chain. This process greatly reduces the amount of data processing on the chain, which helps to improve the transaction efficiency and scalability of the Bitcoin network.
Fourth, it promotes the interoperability of blockchain technology. Implementing ZKP verification on the Bitcoin network can enhance the interoperability of Bitcoin with other blockchain networks. For example, through ZKP, it is easier to transfer assets and exchange data between Bitcoin and other ZKP-supported blockchains. This provides a foundation for further building more complex cross-chain applications, helps integrate the advantages of different blockchain networks, and forms a more powerful blockchain ecosystem.
Why the industry attaches so much importance to the development of Bitcoin L2
A very realistic problem is that since the start of this round of bull market, the price of Bitcoin has quickly broken through the high point of the previous bull market before the block reward was halved, and the circulating market value is approaching 2 trillion US dollars again. This means that as the market value of Bitcoin continues to rise, in order to replicate the 20-fold increase in each previous bull market, a larger scale of incremental funds will need to enter the market, otherwise the miners' income will be greatly reduced without making changes. Another reason is that although Bitcoin has been triumphant in terms of price increase in the past year, leaving Ethereum behind by several streets; but in terms of ecological construction, Bitcoin is deserted. Although the outbreak of inscriptions has given us hope for improving Bitcoin's scalability, inscriptions alone are difficult to sustain the enthusiasm of the market, and are not enough to take on the urgent influx of funds. So naturally, if you want to build a better Bitcoin ecosystem, you must do a good job in infrastructure construction and develop L2.
Perhaps we can verify this view in the development history of Ethereum. Ethereum's L2 large-scale trial began after the outbreak of DeFi due to users' dissatisfaction with the inefficient processing speed and high gas fees of the main network, but in the end, with the development and improvement of L2, it fed back to the great prosperity of the Ethereum ecosystem.
From the initial Plasma and State Channels solutions to the later Optimistic Rollups and ZK-Rollups solutions, as L2 solutions mature, more and more DeFi and DApps begin to run on L2, reducing user transaction fees and confirmations. time, significantly improving user experience, reducing transaction costs, and increasing transaction speed and network scalability. At its peak in November 2021, Ethereum L2’s TVL once exceeded 100 billion US dollars, which was only a short year after the rise of L2.
In contrast, the TVL peak of Bitcoin L2 is only 1.3 billion US dollars. The reason for such a huge difference is not the user volume and funds, but the completeness of the infrastructure and the resulting differences in the cost and convenience of deploying and using smart contracts. However, with the continuous innovation of Zulu Network and other entrepreneurial teams focusing on Bitcoin L2 solutions, we have reason to believe that the construction of the Bitcoin ecosystem has come to the eve of an explosion, and a real Bitcoin L2 era is about to begin.
This can be seen from the response of the GitHub community after Zulu Network open sourced its code. Within a week of the Zulu team's code being open sourced, it attracted the attention of many developers on GitHub, who provided many suggestions to improve and optimize the code.
Finally, we should applaud Zulu. In addition to the value that the Zulu Network team has contributed to improving the Bitcoin network infrastructure, its open source ZKP verification code has a more far-reaching impact. First, it can provide a powerful tool and reference implementation for developers, which will help community members to innovate and improve on this basis and promote the development of the entire blockchain technology. Second, open source code can also help educate and popularize ZKP technology, help more developers understand and apply this complex cryptography technology, and promote its widespread application in blockchain and other fields.
