Bitcoin Lightning Hacker Burak Introduces New Layer 2 ‘Brollups’

The Bitcoin developer famous for exploiting a bug in the Lightning network is working on a new Bitcoin Layer 2 that aims to bring more decentralized financial use cases to Bitcoin, prompting an emergency update in 2022.

Last year, the Bitcoin developer that created a competitor to the Lightning Network called the Arc Protocol introduced “Burak” – “Brollups”.

Broloop is a layer 2 that provides a bitcoin-native package design — aggregating transactions without the need to aggregate transactions or issue non-bitcoin tokens, Burak explained.

In a June 21 Medium post, Burak said that Broloops is still in the “design phase.” He told Cointelegraph that a testnet release could be on the cards later this year.

Broloops aims to support more than 90% of use cases in DeFi when it eventually launches, Burak said.

“A token sale order on an NFT trading list or decentralized exchange where the buyer pays in Bitcoin upon execution; [all of this is] It is atomically executed, verifiable, scalable and enforceable on Bitcoin.

Broloops is “deeply baked into Bitcoin and works with Bitcoin as a paid construct,” added Burak.

Broloops are managed by “operators”, who provide liquidity to the protocol and enhance the blockchain by chaining Bitcoin transactions at “regular intervals”.

Transactions are done on a Bitcoin virtual machine.

Burak has been widely praised in the Bitcoin community for developing the solution without having to harden Bitcoin or create a new token.

From hacking the lightning network to building a scalable competitor

In October 2022, Burak was able to use the Lightning Network for 998-of-999 multi-signature Taproot transactions.

After Burak's efforts caused all nodes to fall out of sync temporarily, the Lightning Network triggered an emergency update for node operators.

Related: Bitcoin needs DeFi, consumer apps for mass adoption — L2 devs

No money was stolen in the transaction — which cost only a $5 transaction fee — but Taproot's reforms highlighted an unintended consequence, industry experts said at the time.

Very few transactions used the Taproot update until Casey Rodermore launched the Ordinals protocol in January 2023.

Taproot transactions accounted for a record 46.4% of all Bitcoin transactions in December 2023, but that fell to 30% this month, Dune Analytics' dashboard from Data Always shows.

Drivechain and Spiderchain are among other Bitcoin mining projects focused on bringing DeFi functionality to Bitcoin.

In May 2022, Burak launched Arch – a Bitcoin layer 2 solution focused primarily on payments, challenging the need for payment channels.

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