On The Brink with Castle Island - Janusz and Red (Bitcoin Layers) on Bitcoin Season 2 (EP.586)

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

Janusz and Red from Bitcoin Layers join the show. In this episode:  Innovation on Bitcoin, previously and now Technology vs consumer adoption The future of BTC use cases More about Bitcoin Layers

On this episode of On the Brink, I was joined by Janush and Red, founders of Bitcoin Layers. Bitcoin Layers is a leading research hub and development platform for the next generation of Bitcoin roll-ups and wider technology. I hope you enjoy this episode. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast.

You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped

75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Today on the podcast, I'm joined by Janusz and Red from Bitcoin Layers. I appreciate you guys coming on and excited to chat. We've been very excited about the Bitcoin space and innovation there over the past year, year plus. I think a great place to start would be personal backgrounds and to hear about how you guys

both got into crypto and got into the focus on Bitcoin and looking into the Bitcoin landscape. Great to be on. So my background's very normal, buying Bitcoin on Coinbase allegedly and getting into the Ethereum space to play with like NFTs and stuff. I was looking at my Ethereum accounts and everything was completely public and my whole balance was there. And I was like, this is scary. I don't really like this. So I got into the privacy space. Actually, I got really privacy-pilled from that moment forward. I thought the entire idea of having a world financial system, just being completely transparent, was a bit weird.

So I got into the privacy space, started working on Zcash and worked at the electric coin company. Really enjoyed my time there. But kind of throughout that time, I got billed on the fact that we could potentially do these things called ZK roll-ups on Bitcoin. And if you did like a ZK roll-up on Bitcoin, you could have the Z-Cash-style execution environment

with pretty minimal trust assumptions. From there, I ended up actually going and working in Ethereum. on roll-up infrastructure for a bit at Espresso systems and learned a lot about the roll-up architecture and different designs over there. And after that, that's when I started writing about Bitcoin roll-ups exclusively. And that led into like building Bitcoin layers more holistically. So I got really interested in the idea of doing Zcash style execution environments for Bitcoin payments. That's why I work on what I do. Very cool. I'm red. I got into all this maybe four or so years ago

getting into Ethereum with some dev works. I was working as a web two dev before this and then I started figuring out that you could do more than send money. You could have all this fun with NFTs and do all these other cool things. I got into it, quit my job and jumped right in.

And I did that for a little while. I taught some solidity. The best way to learn about this stuff is to teach it. And my buddy said something funny last week. My buddy Mike goes, not to gatekeep, but if I couldn't program in FPGA. I wouldn't call myself a dev. So I'll get that out of the way. My background is electrical engineering. I can program in FPGA. Yeah, I took a research arc after that. I'm

like, I'm just working in ETH. There's all these other things. So I spent a year and a half at Masari and I was learning about all the base layer architectures I could, all the modular things I could. And that kind of brought me back to Bitcoin saying there's a lot of cool stuff out there like Dpin and DFI. And if it could have been built on Bitcoin the first time, it would have, now I think it will be, and that's why I'm over here in Bitcoin world. Awesome. Well, Red, maybe I'll shoot it back over to you. It's really encouraging to hear someone who was working in and around FPGAs feel like the most exciting thing for them is Bitcoin, because I think you hear about a lot of the excitement on the AI and chip side of

things. So what is it that drew you to that? And then Yon, just feel free to jump in after and talk about how you ended up going the Bitcoin direction after your experience in crypto. When I first started studying all this stuff, that was college days and that was just basic electrical engineering and software stuff, which I thought was pretty cool. But I knew about Bitcoin at the time, and it wasn't really exciting enough for me to work in it, to be honest, because I thought it was just BTC the currency. And I thought a sovereign, unstoppable currency was very cool, but not cool enough for me to totally dedicate all my time to it. When I realized that the other half of the coin, it's a network that you can use as really just a database. to put any kind of information you want on, and that's how you can use it to do all these other things that are not payments, just peer-to-peer transfers, that's when I thought it was

really cool. So that's what got me into it, really, was being able to discern an asset from a network and the doors that open up with a network. So I mentioned some of those sectors before. DPN, defy, NFTs, which is really just online community building, all these cool things you can do with governance and online taxes for digital property. Those are the, the things that really excited me and made me say, all right, this is a sandbox. You can do anything with this. From my side, it's probably the other end of that spectrum. I'm really only interested in these systems as money. I don't really think of any use case outside of that. So the reason I looked at Bitcoin, and even when I was working at espresso, I remember during my interview

process, I told my previous boss and the other co-founders there that I was only interested in roll-ups and then working on Bitcoin. And this is before Chainway and Roll Kit and all these projects had announced they were even considering this, so people thought I was nuts. But the reason I was interested in that was because I think the fair launch idea of like the token issuance and proof of work was really important. And I think Bitcoin obviously does that very well, being evenly distributed and having people actually have to earn the coins rather than just being distributed from like some token launch and a proof stake system. That for me was really important in the Zcash space. And this is not a shot at Zcash, but I did have an issue because in the beginning of Zcash,

the way they did the block reward was they distributed 20% to like a very small group of people. And then further after that, first having, they distributed that 20% to like three organizations, really just two organizations based in the United States. I didn't think that was a very fair issuance model. So that's why I started looking and how you could do those same types of things in Bitcoin because I viewed Bitcoin as a more fair, credibly neutral system. So that's how I look at it. And I think you have to have those properties to be a base layer of money.

Could you orient for anyone listening what's happening? what's happening in Bitcoin today from your perspective and from an advancement point of view and maybe roll that into what is Bitcoin layers and how does it relate to that? Again, sectors I mentioned before, NFTs and stuff, these existed in other parts of crypto. These arguably had some product market fit within the community, but these things were never on Bitcoin. Bitcoin was about money and store value or peer-to-peer payments and it definitely felt a little more responsible. From my point of view, a lot of the voices in the Bitcoin space were like, we are not interested in that stuff. We don't want NFTs. We don't want DFI. We have what we need.

And then Ordinals came out. And it was proven pretty quickly that that's not the case, that a lot of these Bitcoin users would love to use NFTs if they could. Just the option wasn't there. So that was the damn breaking and people saying, oh, wait, people want added functionality. it just hasn't been here. So from my point of view, that made me say, all right, these things going on in crypto, what if they could be going on in Bitcoin? And then we get things like the Bifian paper that bring a lot of intellectuals from other areas of crypto back to Bitcoin and saying, wait, maybe the things that I want to build can be built

on Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the best monetary asset to back it up. It has the most resilient network. And if you could build on that, why would you build anywhere else? We're getting a taste of added functionality, and we are getting some pipe dreams of crazier things we could do that aren't in production yet, but seem very real these days. And that's bringing a lot of builders that have been building roll-ups and all these other scaling solutions and crypto sectors. It's kind of bringing them back to the Bitcoin world. Red mentioned there a point saying like none of this stuff is in production.

So the reason Bitcoin layers exists is I was blogging on my own when I was working at espresso, I was blogging on Bitcoin roll-ups, and I was like, this is how these things could work. And this was before BitVM, this is when it was just doing sovereign roll-ups. I think all roll-ups are sovereign roll-ups to be very clear, but I'm just going to go with the very more used nomenclatures to not get into like semantics debates. But like they weren't what people call classical roll-ups. They have this like official bridge that everyone views. They call it the canonical bridge contract.

It's the kind of how everyone officially views the state. The bridge is what finalizes the roll-up and all these things. that wasn't really possible. So what happened was when I was building all this stuff for the blog, people started messaging me and they started saying like, hey, have you seen all these new projects pop up on Twitter that are claiming to be ZK rollups? And I was like, okay, wow, that's a bit weird. These really can't exist in the way that we know them in like Ethereum lands.

So I started looking into this stuff. What I found was just a lot of misguided marketing claims and claiming that things were Bitcoin rollups or L2s when they in fact weren't. That created some motivation to start the, Bitcoin Layers Project with the help of some other people in the ecosystem, Red included, to start analyzing these things and analyze the various trust assumptions that they have, because not only were these things not roll-ups, they were fairly centralized. There was two to three people that held all the money that was locked in the system.

There were stories about users depositing funds into these chains and not being able to get their money out. There was this idea of people claiming that we have these really trust-minimized systems that are like layer-toes to Bitcoin, but in fact they were like completely centralized and opaque. So the reason that we started the Bitcoin Layers project was to look at these things more granularly because most people on Twitter ignore them. And they're like, oh, that seems like it's not worth paying attention to. But there are actually people that put money into these things. And they sometimes DM us and are like, hey, who actually is controlling all the money for

this thing? And then we tell them. And they're like, oh, that's quite scary. So that's the reason we started the project was just to bring some more transparency to this new category. There obviously was this explosion of interest of doing all this stuff with Bitcoin and Bitcoin the asset. So we decided that this was the opportunity to start building something out that documented it a bit more closely. Yeah, you guys are like gatekeepers of the new Bitcoin community and era. Marketing police. Not yet.

Red, I think you nailed the description of the narrative. Another question I had, which I think would hopefully draw interest from people, is where does this go? maybe if you fast forward six to 12 months, I'd argue we're in a hot crypto cycle, so it's probably timely. The things you could do in defy with Ethereum or with other assets before, do you think you'll be able to do them with Bitcoin, and we'll just have a level innovation that sits below that experience. On a basic level, probably defy lending and borrowing in more robust fashion and with assets and other chains, staking and security-based functionality and yield,

do you think those things will be completely open to Bitcoin holders, say, in the next 12, 24 months? They already are. So when you look at the numbers, the overwhelming majority of this type of activity is done on Ethereum and Ethereum adjacent networks. So if you look at the overall activity on like the newer Bitcoin L2s or things that call themselves Bitcoin L2s, they're still dwarfed by WBT and other solutions on Ethereum. A better way to maybe frame looking at this when people, think about, oh, can I actually use Bitcoin-backed assets in these different execution environments for these different applications, is looking at it through the lens of, do I have much stronger

security assumptions to getting my money out of the system if everything goes wrong? The best in class that we have today is maybe the 11 to 15 Federation SBTC launched today on stacks. I would say that's a pretty good model. Believe it or not, even though everyone in ICP, two-way peg that they have in place actually is a decent two-way peg. like a side chain design. Rootstock has a five and nine federation that they all run specific hardware to secure the specific signing keys. These are pretty robust systems.

But looking a step further is when you implement things like BitVM, especially when the system is a roll-up, which means that the transaction data and the data needed to recover the state for the system lives on Bitcoin, you can actually build really secure bridges that rely on this one-of-end trust assumption for liveliness among an operator set. So let's say that's like a federation of 15 entities. You trust that one of them will be online to process these withdrawals or deposits into the system. And then you can have this unbounded one event security, meaning that anybody who's online can submit a fraud proof is what they're known as to challenge incorrect withdrawals from the bridge from the

operators. To basically simplify that, that means a system can have a one-of-n liveliness assumption from a federation and a one-of-n security assumption from anybody who's online and able to contest malicious actors. That from a theoretical perspective is much stronger than the traditional federation model. So I would say when you look at these new styles of systems, if they have that trust assumption, and especially if they're using Bitcoin for data availability, you're unlocking a more secure way to transact with Bitcoin the asset in these different styles of execution environments. And a sidebar, there are other systems that can use BitVM,

like I know rootstock and other side chains want to develop BitVM-like systems. You have proposals like shielded CSV, which are client-side valuation systems that will be able to use these style of bridges. But I think when people think about it, Citri and Alpin are the two teams, the new frontier of Bitcoin execution environments, those are the teams that come to mind. I don't know if roll up sort of perfect solution, but these are the two things that I would say that are driving a potentially more theoretically secure environment than what we have existing today.

I'll touch on that answer a little more. So your question was, when do we get Bitcoin Defi? Are we getting that anytime soon? And I see it as two different desires. There's a lot of disagreement over this space in general because I think people come from two distinct camps. One of them is I like BTCD asset and it has a lot of liquidity. I want to use BTC asset for more things.

And the other group of people says, I like Bitcoin the network and I want to do different types of transactions with the same security as Bitcoin the network. If all you care about is the asset, like use it on Solana, why do you need that Bitcoin L2? If you just want the liquidity, if you don't want to use a different network, then you're looking for scaling Bitcoin, not scaling BTC. These are usually different groups of people, like sometimes overlapping. So the first group, like if you just like BTC, the asset, cool, go use Coinbase CBBTC. Go use BitcoinWBTC and use them on Ethereum or Arbitrum or wherever.

That's your goal. It's accomplished. But many of these people are like, no, no, it has to be Bitcoin security. That's what I want. And that is what a lot of these Bitcoin layers are trying to build. Right now, a lot of them are like side chain models. If they could be roll-ups, I'm sure they would be. But that's what these teams are trying to figure out.

It's like, how do we extend Bitcoin to network, not just the asset? So Trey and Alpin are both teams trying to build those roll-ups, as the honest mentioned. They're going in that direction. This is not something really widely talked about. and I don't know why because it is a massive user experience issue, but for example, Botanics is not going the roll-up direction because there are trade-offs related to roll-ups and there are limitations that a lot of these systems will have in the future,

and they're really hard to build. You look at Botanics, which is doing this 11 to 15 Federation model at launch, but they're doing it with a pretty cool consensus mechanism that makes block times really fast and makes the finality guarantees pretty strong. They're going to offer a much better user experience than a lot of the traditional side chains that have existed before. And additionally, they're going to be using their wrapped version of Bitcoin, their pegged version of Bitcoin as the gas token or the fee token or rather.

So when you're a user, the only token that you have to interact with on Botanics, for example, is Bitcoin, which is largely different than having to do that on things like base arbitram Ethereum, et cetera. So this idea that we might be able to have networks that have similar trust models and guarantees compared to those other networks. and additionally, our denominated in Bitcoin versus another asset is another very minor, but I think pretty significant from a user experience perspective, detail that we leave out a lot. So I think systems like that are also very interesting.

Yeah, I think the points that you guys made about one that we have a functional version, at least of Bitcoin in the EVM that you can do basically all your same activities with, and that there are these two camps of what people are looking for are very important in this discussion. I'll touch on the EVM Bitcoin piece in a second, but how important is it, do you think, eventually to have people be able to originate financial actions from Bitcoin L1 or from the Bitcoin main chain? There's obviously demand for it because ordinals were obviously a massive space. I think that a lot of the new token standards that people are releasing are getting more attention.

I always see this Twitter space is on Twitter. It's always ruins was a mistake. And I feel like that's a joke because I feel like more people are starting to use them. If you look at things, for example, like Arch Networks is a good maybe example of this. There's side chain, but they also have a virtual machine that enables them to interact with like pre-sign Bitcoin transactions. So you can create this user experience where users can do swaps and different types of token transfers on the L1 without having to actually bridge funds into the side chain, which creates a better

trust assumption for the user. And I think a lot of people are building on that where it's like, well, we don't even have really high fees right now. We don't even have a lot of activity on the L1 itself. So why do we need to have L2? So I think creating use cases for people to do these activity, maybe it's abstracted the way through a meta protocol or through a different off-chain virtual machine who's executing the transactions indirectly. But yeah, I feel like that's a use case that a lot of people are also looking at over the next little bit. I think it just depends on what users are looking for. I think the reason people think of it from an L2 perspective, because it's really easy to get

nerd sniped by a lot of this stuff because it's cool. On the topic of we have Bitcoin assets that exist in the EVM and Ethereum, just with trust assumptions, I could see a different world where that would have taken off a lot more, where you have, let's say, more WBTC on Ethereum than you have Ethereum on Ethereum. Why do you think there wasn't more usage of WBT and other Bitcoin assets in DFI? Do you think it's because of the stubbornness of the Bitcoin community, which I think was well documented for a while or some other reason? I mentioned before that Bitcoiners definitely love to degen despite what anyone says. Bitcoiners like ordinals. They like all that stuff. I'm still not

sold on Bitcoiners are down for custodial solutions. E-cash is cool. It's custodial. CBBTC is cool. It's custodial. EVM, VTC wrappers, these are lacking adoption. It's like 1% of BTC is in there. And if you consider everyone is cool with spot BTC, sure, and that's the end of the story. No, that's not going to be it. Everyone wants yield. Everyone wants to do something with this asset that's not Celsius or lesser forms of custodial finance. That's not really the end goal that people want. So I think the desire is there. It's just the fact that we really only have custodial solutions that have size. I was just listening to a podcast on this. I'm kind of regurgitating someone else's opinion that I just happened to agree with. But if you look at the Ethereum L2 ecosystem as well,

you don't have the same type of volume. You have a lot of activity and a lot of transactions, but the overall amount of money that doing different defy activities with size, as Reds mentioned, these are still done on Ethereum L1, and there's a lot of competition for other L1 to potentially take that market share away unless Ethereum dedicates more time to improving that experience on the L1. Specifically, it's really hard to get someone who's doing really large position, to move that money and do those same type of activities into a system that's basically governed and able to be upgraded immediately by a 4-6 multi-sic, which is the majority of Ethereum and L2s. If you look at it as well from like an L2 general purpose scaling roadmap, these are really

hard things to build. You also have to potentially question are these things from a Bitcoin perspective going to get adoption if they still have those same type of trust assumptions? So it's just something worth considering as you're designing these different solutions. When it comes to either Bitcoin roll-ups, other technology that maybe we haven't discussed, or you can even take this to say, wrapped implementations of Bitcoin on Ethereum or other chains, do you see risks? Are there major risks that stand out in your head?

Yes, that's why we exist. A lot of this stuff is pretty risky. And you think about it, if TVL is maybe a bug bounty, like more money going into these is maybe an incentive. an incentive for if these systems weren't sound for someone to go break it. There's absolutely risk of losing your funds, getting your funds frozen, any of that when you're dealing with the sodium. There are liveness issues. If people who are running a bridge after X amount of years aren't transferring keys and then things aren't online and you can't hit quorum, there's usually some sort of liveliness backup for a lot of these federated bridges and stuff,

but the risks are absolutely there. You are taking some risk other than does the Bitcoin network disappear? You're always doing that. We see these terms like settlement layer and extending Bitcoin in the most trust minimized way fashion, having the blockchain be 100% secured by Bitcoin's hash power. People take that at face value and they're like, oh, this is a super trust minimized way. This is like using native Bitcoin. In fact, if you're taking your Bitcoin and you're locking it into a bridge, you can't move

Bitcoin off Bitcoin, it still stays there. What's happening in any of these systems is you're using a wrapper. And I think what a lot of people don't understand is that when you have Bitcoin on stacks, Bitcoin on liquid, Bitcoin on root stock, Bitcoin on a roll-up, if the bridge broke and those tokens became unbacked, you could still use those tokens. They just wouldn't be worth anything because you couldn't redeem the asset for the asset that's locked in the L1. I think the biggest thing is that there's always some level of risk of getting your money out. I think a really good way to look at trust minimizations. Are you replacing humans with cryptography?

And in any of these systems, you are not. So I would not really call any of these things trust minimized to be completely candid. Trust minimized is a dangerous phrase. It's used everywhere. Yeah, it's super dangerous because the Alpin implementation of its bridge, which I think they're calling like Snarknato or something similar, Stratabridge, is going to be. the most trust-minimized way to potentially put Bitcoin into another blockchain. But that doesn't

mean it is by definition trust-minimized or trustless. It just happens to be more trust-minimized on that spectrum theoretically versus another implementation. A lot of people misunderstand that. I think another thing people additionally misunderstand is that in a lot of these systems, if the transaction data is not available on Bitcoin and you as a user can't access that data and contest people who are making malicious withdrawal requests are trying to steal the money, you are trusting an independent set of operators or another blockchain's operator set

with essentially the custody of your funds. For example, in a side chain, if there's like a malicious private fork, and then the bridge is just following the fork with the most economic weight behind it, then they could steal your money. Additionally, if the bridge is a federation, the federation could collude and steal your money.

People would misunderstand that a lot of these systems are reliant on human actors at the end of the day or an independent blockchain consensus set that typically has another token. There's always risks all the way down. And then even in the most trust minimized scenario, you might even have, for example, on the most trust minimized bridge implementation, there might be an upgrade mechanism where like a four of six or three or five multi-sig can essentially just kick everyone out and take over the whole thing because there's like a bug and they do that for security reasons.

They could do that in a malicious way as well. So I think people are very, very excited about the new way to do things. But at least in my analysis of the system is that I don't really see how anything today is any different than what we've already had over the last little while. And I'm just really, really hopeful that the newer systems can improve on trust assumptions here in the near future. So that's how I thought about it. Hot take on wrapped tokens is Ripple was right. Ripple didn't call them stable coins or wrapped BTC. They called all of it IOUs on the XRPL 10 years ago.

everything was an IOU if it didn't come from that network. That is a lot more intuitive of what it is. You do not own that VTC. You own an IOU, and you are hoping that whoever actually owns it will redeem that IOU if you want to. I think another thing people misunderstand as well is if you look at a lot of these systems that are live today, if you go to our site, for example, and you just click on any of the live blockchains that are Bitcoin layers

or claim to be Bitcoin layers dependent on your definition of it, you look at them and you look at the distribution of TVL, Bitcoin back tokens that have been minted or created on the system. And a lot of that doesn't come from like the quote unquote canonical or official bridge that the company building that specific blockchain is like also building a bridge to support the getting Bitcoin into their new blockchain. A lot of it comes from like third party providers that are these new Bitcoin back tokens and they're getting quite big. Maybe there's like some financial incentive to use these things, maybe points, new token airdrops coming, whatever.

Our only product market fit. Points and tokens are the product market fit. The best thing right now. If you look at the distribution of the actual Bitcoin assets on these chains, a lot of it is coming from these third-party wrapped tokens, even if they have like a bridge that might be secured by its own validator set or it might be upgrading to fraud proofs in the future or whatever, a lot of it still is coming from the third-party asset.

If you're using a blockchain, let's say it's a roll-up, and it has the most secure bridge implementation that's possible today. But the U.S. of using that bridge really, really sucks. And you just end up using the most popular Bitcoin-back synthetic. Your settlement is not from the official bridge. It's from the custodian provider who, like, is keeping maybe some Excel spreadsheet in their internal docs. It's not actually from the actual most secure bridge implementation.

So I think that's why we've taken a stance, maybe controversially, to not really look at these things as official bridges. or canonical bridges, we just kind of look at them as execution layers or blockchains, and then what we just generally call a bridge two-way peg or wrapper, whatever word you want to use for it, we kind of have started to look at those things in isolation because the most secure thing doesn't always map to the most used thing. We're starting to see that with things that are in production today. Yeah, without a doubt, I feel like I see that as a user at least. It's funny to speak to because I feel like you've such different profiles of crypto users.

You have the Bitcoin holder who only has one hardware device that sits under their bed and the Bitcoin never moves. And then you have the only Coinbase user, which is a different risk or trust tolerance. And then you have the person with money and 100 different protocols, 100 different smart contracts. It's always funny because risk can depend on what people's definition is. Is there anything else that you guys would highlight in terms of what people should be excited about, particularly if they're Bitcoin enthusiasts to begin with? One thing we haven't even talked about is we shared like a new product update and then

someone shared it and then someone commented on the tweet and have to give them a shout out and just thank them for their work. But we're basically based on a site that exists in Ethereum today that does very similar analysis to Ethereum L2 solutions. And a person commented on this product update. It's like it makes me really sad to see that on their site's called L2B, that there's not really any trust minimized layer two that exists. But on your site, Bitcoin layers, there is because it's lightning. Most people don't use it this way, but in theory you can use Lightning in a relatively trust-minimized fashion. So my comeback was like, oh, well, that's not really how it's used.

And the comment was like, well, I'd rather have an L2 that maybe 10% of people use in a self-custodial fashion than an L2 that no one can use in a self-custodial fashion because there's a fourth upgrade multisic behind it, which is most of the roll-ups in practice today. That's actually quite exciting. So if you are looking to use a scaling solution to do maybe just payments, but in that fashion, that is accessible to you if you want to do it in the sovereign way, and there are people that do that today. I'd also say that one thing I'm excited about is

using lightning as this universal point of sale system or this interoperability system. I know people have thought of it that way. If I use like a Fediman or eCash wallet or even, I know Citra has developed this on their test net. Satria's a roll up, being able to pay lightning invoices with a variety of different systems, I think is a really cool thing because if I travel, you know, to El Salvador and I am not using maybe a lightning wallet, but maybe I'm using an eCash wallet, I can still pay that invoice of McDonald's, which I think is actually really cool and solve some of the end user fragmentation that exists in a lot of other ecosystems. I think that's quite neat. And then I think we do need to give a special shout out to ARC. I think there's a lot of cool things. People

traditionally think of ARC is like maybe an alternative to Lightning, but the ARC labs team has been maybe framing it as anything that you can do basically on chain with Bitcoin, you can do off chain with ARC with more trust assumptions, but potentially in a more scalable way. So maybe things like ordnals or different meta-procall transactions. You can do those with like an arc VTXO, which from my very limited understanding, I think is pretty cool. So those are things that I'm maybe looking forward to over the next year in addition to the roll-up projects. Yeah, that's the right curve answer. Left curve answer is I want validity roll-ups. That's what excites me. With or without four of six upgrade multi-sigs.

Yeah. Everything boils down to a multi-sig with a covenant ideal. It's all multi-sigs. We'll appreciate you guys coming on. This has been a really fun conversation and hopefully we can do it again sometime. Totally. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. Really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island.Vicc. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the brink dashpodcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.