Layer-2 network BOB has launched its testnet ahead of the mainnet going live in Q4 of this year.
Describing itself as a hybrid layer-2, BOB’s aim is to combine Bitcoin’s security and reserves with Ethereum’s programmability using the BitVM computing paradigm to create a decentralized finance (DeFi) hub.
BitVM was introduced in late 2023 by Robin Linus as a means of enabling rollups atop Bitcoin, thus allowing faster and cheaper transactions without compromising the network’s security.
BOB’s bridge harnesses BitVM to allow BTC to be transferred to the rollup and later bring it back so that it can be withdrawn.
Central to BOB’s ethos is that it will use actual BTC rather than a wrapped version of the asset as the fuel for DeFi services. Some projects use a form of wrapped bitcoin to bring BTC’s value to their ecosystem for use in DeFi applications, such as Stacks with its sBTC token.
“Just as ETH remains ‘ETH’ on Ethereum rollups like Optimism and Arbitrum, BTC on BOB remains native and simply called ‘BTC’,” BOB said in an announcement shared with CoinDesk on Wednesday.
Rollups such as Arbitrum bundles transactions which it then settles on Ethereum on the cheap, using fraud proofs to ensure their correctness. BOB says it is doing something akin to this on Bitcoin.
Co-founder Alexei Zamyatin described this as a “clear distinction,” between its offering and wrapped versions of BTC, in a Telegram message to CoinDesk.
The testnet debuts with support from a host of major crypto firms who will be operating nodes on the BitVM bridge, such as staking developers P2P.org and Lombard, DeFi platform Solv Protocol, crypto venture capitalists RockawayX and digital asset manager Amber Group.