ARTICLE AD BOX
This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
Ethereum’s major oracle provider, Chainlink, is making moves in the growing ecosystem of BTCFi (Bitcoin Finance).
Botanix Labs, the team behind the EVM-compatible Bitcoin L2 Spiderchain, is integrating Chainlink’s data feeds to allow inter-blockchain communication to the world of EVM.
As part of the partnership, Botanix is participating in Chainlink Scale, a gas grant program that Chainlink offers to onboarded blockchains to initially cover the operating costs of their oracle networks.
Spiderchain is also integrating Chainlink’s cross-chain interoperability protocol (CCIP), which serves to enable programmable token/data transfers across different blockchains.
Johann Eid, chief business officer at Chainlink Labs, said “Botanix is the first Bitcoin layer-2 to join Scale, a significant step in helping its developers to build secure, scalable and fully-featured dapps on Bitcoin.”
Like other players in the BTCFi space, Spiderchain strives to unlock the use of BTC natively on the thousands of EVM-compatible dapps today.
Spiderchain explicitly eschews Bitcoin’s non-fungible UTXO (unspent transaction output) model while embracing Ethereum’s nimbler “account model.”
It’s a slow redefinition of what Bitcoin is traditionally known for. Bitcoin’s dominant narrative is being a digital gold-like “reserve” asset due to the blockchain’s lack of smart contract compatibility.
Spiderchain derives its name from its chain’s design. According to Botanix’s docs, the chain is a permissionless set of “distributed network of multisigs, safeguarded by a randomized subset of participants,” known as orchestrators.
Orchestrators deposit BTC into the multisig wallets as a kind of escrow bond to participate in consensus, and run a Bitcoin and Spiderchain node simultaneously.
A decentralized sequencer will be used from day one of Spiderchain’s launch. By leveraging Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade, Spiderchain is also able to accommodate a larger network of multisigs on the Bitcoin parent chain as is, without requiring any soft forks.
Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.
Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.
Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.
The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.