Merry Christmas and Happy New Years from the Blockspace Media team!

Today’s newsletter is a guest post from our friends over at Bitcoin Layers discussing all things Bitcoin renaissance in 2024. Be sure to give them a follow on Twitter and bookmark their website.

Today’s newsletter is about a 2 minute read.

Bitcoin Layers in 2024: Real Growth or Just Another Hype Cycle?

The last 12 months saw a resurgence of Bitcoin aligned tech stacks.

Internal documentation from Bitcoin Layers shows over 100 Bitcoin projects came to market in the last 12 months, with around 40 projects directly calling themselves a “bitcoin l2.” Around 17 of those are live and in production.

Some quick points on the recent explosion:

• There’s already been a few rug pulls. For example ZKSats, ran a public token sale and then ran away with people’s funds

• While most projects claim to be rollups, only a small few are planning on using bitcoin for data availability. Most proposed projects are sidechains or rollups to an alternative blockchain

• 57 projects within the ~100 have launched tokens or have announced their intention to launch a token. Some of these projects have rugged users or abandoned development

• Not everything is another blockchain! Ark Labs and Second are building on Ark. Mercury Layer and Spark are developing in the statechain arena

• All projects, except for Statechains, Arks, and Lightning, see users interact with some permissioned custodian, federation, or network, to secure the funds backing their wrapped version of BTC on the network

• That’s why there’s been a huge focus on BitVM and a resurgence on reactivating OP_CAT or other proposals that enable more expressiveness in bitcoin Script

In this post, we’ll be going through some definitions on what a Bitcoin layer is in the first place, make our way through some of the projects like Liquid, BitVM and Lightning, before finishing on some more philosophical takes on what it all means for Bitcoiners.

Continue reading here.

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