BOB: Early Renaissance

[nud3l]

Abstract

The Early Renaissance marks the official testnet launch for BOB. The testnet allows for:

1. Users to bridge BTC, P2P swap ERC20s, BTC, and BRC20s, interact with EVM smart contracts, interact with zkVM off-chain programs, and pay with a bridged BTC for transaction fees.
2. Builders to deploy EVM contracts and zkVM off-chain programs, interact with Bitcoin via a BTC relay, and let users pay tx fees in BTC in their apps via an SDK.

Motivation

The Early Renaissance had a significant overlap with the period of the Late Middle Ages but marked the progression into modernity. Similarly, for BOB, the period of the Early Renaissance is marked by many influencing factors that will shape the BOB stack as the collective members are onboarded. Each member will bring in new influences that will work together to progress the stack to set the standard for building on Bitcoin.

The Early Renaissance for BOB leads to the official testnet launch. The testnet will enable users to test early beta and alpha versions of applications built on BOB. In turn, builders can gain feedback on how to improve their apps and work towards mainnet launch. BOB itself will start to offer an SDK to interact with the BTC relay as well as pay for tx fees with BTC. BOB should improve based on the builder feedback by adding missing features and improving the developer experience. Ideally, it would take a week to create a working demo for a new app built with BOB.

Goals

Target completion: Before Christmas 2023

• Builders can deploy EVM contracts on a hosted testnet
• Builders can interact with the BTC relay aided by types and examples from a Solidity library
• Users can pay tx fees in a bridged BTC as if it was a native transaction
• Users can interact with EVM smart contracts using WalletConnect and MetaMask
• Users and builders can interact with EVM smart contracts programmatically (ethers.js, wagmi, ...)
• Builders can interact with zkVM programs from their Solidity smart contracts
• A novel use case combines Bitcoin, zkVM, and BOB
• Users can learn about how BOB works in the documentation
• Builders learn how to build on BOB with the documentation
• Builders understand how BOB works under the hood via the documentation

Requirements

Deliver a hosted testnet, a P2P swap dapp, an SDK, and an zkVM ordinals indexer.

Testnet

Requirements and specification tracked in #16

SDK

The BOB SDK is meant as a set of Solidity contracts, Rust and/or TypeScript functions, and UI components to access the unique functions of BOB and make developing new applications on BOB simple. Where possible, existing libraries (OpenZeppelin, ethers.js, wagmi, viem, ethers-rs, foundry, react, ...) should be preferred before adding new functionality.

Requirements and specification tracked in #17

P2P Swap

The P2P swap is meant to expose a set of smart contracts that allow users to swap BTC, BRC20s, and ERC20s. Anyone should be able to deploy a UI and additional tooling (improved order matching, ...) on top of these smart contracts.

Requirements and specification tracked in #7

zkVM

The zkVM would allow anyone to write complex programs like a full ordinals indexer with an integrated DEX and then verify the correctness of the code without having to run a dedicated consensus over it. This is more of a moonshot project. But if it works, would provide an avenue to extend BOB with a range of Bitcoin programs like: ordinals and BRC20 DEXs, ordinals and BRC20 lending protocols, BTC stablecoins, decentralized LN hubs, autonomous nostr relayers, and many more.

Requirements and specification tracked in #3