Analyzing the Five Major BTC Layer 2 Solutions: Which is More Native, Decentralized, and Practical?

Recently, the Bitcoin Layer 2 network has become a hot topic in the crypto market, with various solutions emerging one after another. From a technical implementation perspective, they can be roughly divided into five categories: Bitcoin Sidechains, UTXO + Client Verification, Taproot Consensus, Multi-signature + EVM, and Rollup. This article will analyze the advantages and disadvantages of these solutions from three dimensions: Bitcoin's native characteristics, Decentralization level, and practical implementation level.

The importance of these three dimensions lies in: the native nature of Bitcoin determines whether it can gain recognition from the Bitcoin community; decentralization is the core of blockchain, relating to the security of BTC management; the level of implementation directly tests the feasibility of the solution.

1. Bitcoin Sidechains

Bitcoin sidechains are independent scalability blockchains from Bitcoin, typically managed through multi-signature methods, mapping BTC on the second layer chain.

1. Native nature of Bitcoin: Poor, difficult to gain support from the Bitcoin community.

2. Degree of Decentralization: Generally poor, asset security relies on multi-signers.

3. Degree of Implementation: Existing for many years, but with limited ecological development, mainly constrained by decentralization and asset security issues.

2. UTXO + Client Verification

Off-chain ledger computation based on the Bitcoin UTXO model, using client-side verification to ensure authenticity. Typical representatives include RGB and BitVM.

1. Bitcoin's Native Nature: Emphasizes nativeness, but the implementation difficulty is extremely high.

2. Degree of Decentralization: Adopts distributed client verification, decentralized without network consensus.

3. Degree of implementation: still in the theoretical stage, facing great uncertainty.

3. Taproot Consensus

A second-layer solution built on the three native technologies of Bitcoin: ( Schnorr signatures, MAST contracts, and the Bitcoin light node network ).

1. Native nature of Bitcoin: Completely based on Bitcoin's native technology, highly native and feasible.

2. Degree of Decentralization: Achieve decentralized Bitcoin management through a BFT consensus network composed of 1000+ Bitcoin light nodes.

3. Degree of implementation: Stable operation for 8 months, processing 6 million transactions, over 30 ecological projects.

4. Multi-signature + EVM

Users will transfer BTC to a multi-signature address to generate new BTC on the EVM chain. The implementation is simple, but the essence remains a sidechain.

1. Bitcoin's native quality: There is almost no native quality.

2. Degree of Decentralization: Asset security completely relies on the multisigners designated by the project party.

3. Degree of implementation: low technical threshold, easy to achieve, but tests the management ability of multi-signers.

Five, Rollup

The Ethereum L2 solution will be introduced to Bitcoin, but Bitcoin does not support Rollup verification.

1. Bitcoin's Native Nature: Poor, difficult to gain support from core Bitcoin users.

2. Degree of Decentralization: The issues of asset management and the decentralization of the second layer ledger have not yet been resolved.

3. Implementation Level: The difficulty of realization is not high, some projects have already taken shape, but still face challenges such as asset management and ledger trust.

Summary

The five major BTC Layer 2 solutions each have their advantages and disadvantages. Bitcoin sidechains find it difficult to gain mainstream support; multi-signature + EVM are easy to replicate but have low decentralization; UTXO + client validation has strong native characteristics but is difficult to implement; Rollups draw from Ethereum but have not resolved fundamental issues; Taproot demonstrates a relatively balanced performance in terms of native characteristics, decentralization, and implementation, making it worth paying attention to.