Renowned Bitcoin developer, Burak, known for exploiting a bug in the Lightning Network that led to an emergency update in 2022, is currently working on a new Bitcoin layer 2 solution. This new solution, called “Brollups,” aims to bring more decentralized finance (DeFi) use cases to Bitcoin.
Burak, who also created the Ark Protocol as a competitor to the Lightning Network last year, has introduced Brollups as a Bitcoin-native rollup design. The unique aspect of Brollups is that it can bundle up transactions without the need for a hard fork or the creation of a non-Bitcoin token.
In a Medium post on June 21, Burak mentioned that Brollups is still in the design phase. However, he indicated that a signet (testnet) rollout could potentially happen later this year.
When Brollups is eventually launched, its goal is to support over 90% of DeFi use cases. Burak emphasized that Brollups is deeply integrated into Bitcoin and functions natively with Bitcoin as a payable construct.
Brollups will be managed by operators who will provide liquidity to the protocol and advance the rollup state by chaining Bitcoin transactions at regular intervals. All transactions will be executed on the Bitcoin Virtual Machine.
Burak received significant recognition within the Bitcoin community for developing this solution without the need for a hard fork or the creation of a new token.
In October 2022, Burak successfully exploited the Lightning Network with a multi-signature Taproot transaction. This exploit prompted an emergency update for Lightning Network node operators as it temporarily caused all nodes to fall out of sync.
Although no funds were stolen in the transaction, it highlighted an unintended consequence of the Taproot upgrade, according to industry experts at the time. Following this incident, the utilization of Taproot transactions remained relatively low until January 2023 when Casey Rodarmor launched the Ordinals protocol.
In December 2023, Taproot transactions accounted for a record 46.4% of all Bitcoin transactions. However, the percentage has since dropped to 30% this month, as shown by a Dune Analytics dashboard from Data Always.
Other Bitcoin scaling projects, such as Drivechain and Spiderchain, also focus on bringing DeFi functionality to Bitcoin.
In May 2022, Burak introduced Ark, a Bitcoin layer 2 solution primarily focused on payments by eliminating the need for payment channels.
In an article titled “Ordinals turned Bitcoin into a worse version of Ethereum – Can we fix it?”, the magazine explores the impact of the Ordinals protocol on Bitcoin and questions whether it can be improved.