London, August 29th, 2023 – The team behind Interlay, a leader in decentralized Bitcoin infrastructure, today released the MVP of BOB (“Build on Bitcoin”) – a new Bitcoin layer 2 network, featuring Rust smart contracts compatible with Bitcoin libraries such as Lightning and Ordinals.
Combined with full support of the Ethereum Virtual Machine, BOB is the best place to innovate, experiment and build novel decentralized applications on top of Bitcoin’s stack.
The first MVP of BOB includes a demo application implementing the Bitcoin standard BRC-21 to trustlessly bridge tokens from other chains to Bitcoin, e.g. ETH, DAI and USDC. The launch of BOB follows the new Bitcoin DeFi platform, released only a month ago.
“Bitcoin is experiencing a long-overdue renaissance,” opined Co-founder Alexei Zamyatin. “Our goal is to enable builders to create truly decentralized applications and innovate on top of Bitcoin’s existing stack, including Lightning, Ordinals and Nostr. Thereby, BOB bets on enabling builders from Ethereum and other ecosystems to quickly bring their DeFi, NFT and other web3 products to Bitcoin’s 300 million users.”
Apart from Rust and EVM smart contracts, the first MVP already boasts Interlay’s trustless BTC bridge and a built-in Bitcoin light client that cryptographically verifies the Bitcoin main chain. This allows teams to create trustless BTC, Ordinals and BRC swaps, as well as other BTC primitives such as hashrate markets.
The full-release schedule will introduce interoperability with Ethereum, a novel Bitcoin peg mechanism improving on top of Interlay’s trustless BTC bridge, and Bitcoin rollup mechanics.
“Rollups are likely the best shot at ensuring long-term value accrual to Bitcoin, improving economic sustainability of the protocol even after future halving events”, explained Dominik Harz, Co-Founder and CTO of the project. “ZK rollups are currently the best bet for such architecture, however we’re building BOB’s to support whatever cryptographic primitives find their way into Bitcoin.”
