Marathon Digital’s Slipstream & Layer 2 Ambitions
In this episode of the Mining Pod, Marathon Digital Holdings dives into their groundbreaking Layer 2 software, Slipstream, and their ambitious plans for Bitcoin inscriptions. Discover how Marathon is revolutionizing the mining world and building a more scalable and secure future for Bitcoin. Learn about the challenges and innovations behind Slipstream, the vision for the Anduro platform, and how Marathon is shaping the next generation of Bitcoin technology.
Transcripts are autogenerated. May contain typos.
hey welcome back to the mining pod on today's show we're joined by Marathon digital Holdings to discuss go her inscription layer 2 software which they announced over the last few weeks has turned a lot of heads because hey they're jumping right into inscriptions and they're trying to build out layer 2 solutions for Bitcoin thank you to Marathon for joining the podcast we'd also like to thank our sponsor on the coindesk podcast Network cleanspark America's Bitcoin minor you'll hear more
from cleanspark later today in the episode okay before we jump into the show we also want to make a shout out to our Bitcoin havening party happening on April 20th here in Denver Colorado if you are in the rocky mountain region be sure to check out our show notes and come to our event got to celebrate the happening only happens once every 4 years we'll have more details on The Happening party in the show notes so click below to check that out okay on to the [Music] show [Music] welcome back to the mining pod we
finally got marathon on to talk about l2s and inscriptions you guys like turned the mining world upside down the other week so thank you for for joining the podcast Julian and micheel hand it over to you guys just for some quick bios first you Julian sure thanks a lot will thanks for having us uh my name is Julian I'm head of product for Enduro and a product lead over at Marathon digital um the the layer to is definitely something very exciting for me I would say my history in blockchain has been across a number of different
networks but yeah my my history in in work has spaned presidential campaigns uh social impact work in latam energy in China I've been everywhere and and know we're all at once so I'll pass it over to you Mike uh yeah I'm Mike Casey or Michael B Casey uh I'm director of engineering here at Marathon been been here for a little over a year which makes me an Oldtimer here uh and yeah um I've been in Bitcoin Bitcoin class of 2012 so I've been around a while uh been in the space did about five years at
General Motors um as jeap blockchain architect um and yeah I spent the last year in Marathon uh mostly building out uh the Enduro platform love it okay so much dive into for the audience we're going to be talking about two things mostly inscriptions and then second of all the layer two I think we could easily do one show on each of these topics but we're going to smos them together we start with the inscriptions announcement since that was first essentially you guys are opening up the Marathon block space that you guys not
only produce because you're Bitcoin miners but also because you have Mara pool you're opening that up to inscriptions and ordinals Builders uh by being like a little more malleable in terms of transactions um Mike I'll throw it to your to you first to kind of describe on an engineering level what this product is about and then julan we'll go to you to talk about like who you guys are opening up this block space for right um so the product is branded slipstream uh it's a marathon slipstream
slipstream do.com is the URL it's currently not actually up and live for direct integration but uh we're taking requests for one-offs currently um but uh this is actually the brainchild of uh a Portland hoddle who we've been working with very closely uh and uh really what it enables us to do is to uh process these non-standard transactions which are kind of in high demand right now uh between ordinal inscriptions and runes and everything else coming on in that whole side of the uh business uh it
allows us to actually Arbitrage the demand for these things because you cannot pass these directly over the network so if you can pass them directly to us as a minor and they're more profitable for us to mine we're we're going to mine them so it's basically long and short Julian what you like get tell us about the the who do you guys who do you want working with this like using this product yeah we basically want main chain transaction innovators which that that can include members of the inscriptions community members of
the ordinals community um members of any community that really wants to try to take Bitcoin transacting in a New Direction I think the really one big theme that we are trying to underscore with this product is that of an to censorship and basically allowing any transaction that of course meets Bitcoin core consensus rules um you know giving it a channel to to be propagated across the network um now of course you know there there are standards right to that but I think by and large you see a lot of the community in 2023 having
innovated to to an extent where now you see other communities in ethereum and salana even taking upon themselves to try out their own hands at inscription so we really just wanted to further that sort of experimentation and feed into this broader Layer Two narrative that Marathon has which is let's find new ways to use Bitcoin simple as that so tell me a little bit about the standardness rules and consensus rules I think this is what TR people up most when they saw this announcement they're like what Bitcoin can't do this like how
how is it supposed to work but obviously there's like more sets of rules here right well um there of course are the standardness rules and there's there's a couple different buckets that those fall in and we haven't loosened the scary Dangerous Ones the the ones that allow people to attack Bitcoin uh instead really we're just more focused on uh you know just removing things that are are more paternalistic in nature like uh the 100 kilobyte uh limit for an individual transaction size if you're talking about
segit transactions it's not really it's not really a problem with that there's no quadratic hashing issue or anything that can lead to an attack on bitcoin that can make it harder to actually validate the blocks right so so that being being said the things that are largely in demand are you know you can do uh dust free transactions um you can do uh you know so sorry there's the dust limits no longer in Play Rather so so you you can actually do transactions all the way down to a single Sato here no no no
value at all if you want if you're willing to pay for the space um and um you can do anything you want with OP returns for example another benefit of the platform is transactions are uh effectively they're they're not public um I wouldn't say there's any guarantee of privacy of it but we do not broadcast them to the wider Network so if you want to snag a vc20 ticker that um you know you don't want to broadcast the fact that you're doing it by posting into the public men pool it represents another
way to do it but uh yeah that's you know as a broad topic that's just basically what slipstream does but the bigger thing I think it's kind of a forray to the other stuff that we're planning on doing with LT 2 specifically um with the ordinals community uh in our our L2 efforts uh but we would like to get to as a a state where we can actually Port uh individual ordinals or vc20 tokens over onto an L2 through slipstream so for the operater and stuff I want to zero in on that because there are a lot of token
projects launching right now around op return and historically in Bitcoin we've also seen that right where op return is used for tokenization it's difficult to do that though because like oper turn has like that like 80 kilobytes or something like that sardous rule you guys are opening that up now and I think a lot of people thought that was a consensus rule right where like you could only is not a consensus rule you can actually do an entire block is not return if you like in consensus I mean if you want you can do extremely large
opper terms I believe I I believe that I'm not entirely certain you can do an entire block but you can do very very large opper turns you can also do a great number of opper turns so in a single transaction versus having to have one and and also you don't have to worry about the Dust limit so okay are you guys talking with token projects or I guess maybe that just seems kind of like from Julian's answer yeah like anyone who's willing to experiment with Bitcoin guys are well we're we're agnostic I
mean so it's not really our our we don't care as much about the payload of it if somebody wants to do a transactions valid Bitcoins valid Bitcoin yeah I will say that in terms of the community demand though it has been very robust and that adds to the the entire approach here is to open the floodgates to any kind of experimentation we're agnostic about the kind of it but we've definitely been receiving a number of inbounds um so yeah anybody that that wants to chat more on it you know we can't promise anything and obviously you
know there are there are limits that we must work under and to to further a point that Mike um made we have really sat down and consulted a lot of the community you know Portland hoddle being on the team Bitcoin core contributor we've consulted to other members of the Bitcoin core um group and yeah we we we want to be careful right at the end of the day we're we're trying to be iterative about this we have taken one approach and open to community feedback on how we've taken that approach and
being very cautious about how this could impact the future of Bitcoin But ultimately man there's been so many different projects we get you know inbound every single day of different people wanting to try it out in different way so um yeah agnostic but it is active that's for sure one other thing I do want to point out uh just to say it is yeah we do have uh explicit terms and conditions that you must agree to in order to use the service so it's you know it isn't just oh we will take absolutely anything it's like you must
also agree to the terms and conditions so yeah gotcha do miners or projects need to kyc before they use the pro your guys' block space no nice okay that's kind of a cool thing uh I've definitely got a lot of comments about that so in in terms of like being agnostic but also protecting bitcoin's block space and being a smart Steward of it how do you guys sort of go around that or like fit those things to those two things together are you guys like do it on a case- by casee basis do you guys have to
you guys have terms of conditions is there like a rule set you guys operate under how do you guys think about that like I said the the start of this is very much where we're also learning as we go um we're the first minor to release a product of this kind and the first kind to think about it being programmatic um you know the the front end is still the the web app itself is still under development but it's coming soon and I think with such a seismic change we wanted to be extra cautious so you know if if somebody wants to submit
obviously a non-standard transaction that takes up an entire block um we call these like custom blocks um definitely something we have to review um on a case- toase basis and weigh it amongst a number of different factors but I'd say the number one thing that we the number one I guess priority we've taken to ensuring that we're good stewards of the Bitcoin blockchain as you you said is again Consulting the community we've had many different people reach out both with praise and some with criticism and
we're happy to get on calls and address those criticisms I I'll put it this way it's this isn't an overnight project we've spent a lot of many months um toiling over thinking through the implications of what we've been doing but ultimately you know we can't just stay in our own heads and so it's it's something that I think through Community dialogue will will get to the most efficient um end state but at the moment it is it is decently ad hoc um decently gotcha okay thanks for clarifying that so recently
you guys had the biggest Bitcoin block ever mind I believe you worked with the runstone project to make that happen tell me a little bit about like the Genesis of of that idea how you guys like come about selection for something like this would you guys always want to fill up an entire block like that or is there other ways you guys are thinking about like how you're filling up block space I think ultimately the the goal as I said is to to try to increase the amount of experimentation and we're most
compelled to unleash the floodgates in directions where the community has a lot of demand and so with the with this particular project you're referring to um it's no secret that this was blasted all across crypto Twitter and it's no secret that a lot of people were seeking this to to be done um most importantly though remember every single block that goes through slipstream it's not free we we're not just simply hey come experiment do whatever you want this project approached us and said hey well you know
we're we're willing to pay a decent amount of Bitcoin well above Market rates and I mean that's that's the core premise of mining you know at the at the end of the day it's a profit mode of sustaining this entire Bitcoin Network and in particular behind mining if there are people were of the belief that if people are willing to pay transaction fees for something that falls under consensus rules we're more than happy to to mine it um so I think the combination of them being willing to pay well above
Market rates and on top of that there being that Community demand it felt like the natural first project to begin with yeah I that if you go out on me do space and you look at those particular blocks and you look at what the expected was and what the actual fee pay was yeah you can see there's there's Delta there so that's what it's about at the end of the day We're Miners and We mine for profit you know one thing I want to like zero in on here is the fact that you guys have the full Tech stack right so like
you guys have the A6 on the ground you guys have a large enough percentage of the network to really have like decent luck over a longterm period and then you guys also have your own pool so that means like you can do with it whatever you want as opposed to a lot of these other miners where you know they're using Foundry they're using luxer they're using someone else and so for you guys there's not really like this concern about like pool payouts or anything like that you guys aren't on like FPS or anything like that so all
the value is a creative I would expect to the shareholders from an Investor's perspective how have you guys seen uh investors like respond to something like this I think fundamentally it's been positive um obviously we're early you know it's there there still much more to see with this product and we still have the web app um to release but it's it's exactly what what Mike said at the end of the day as we head into the avening um the issue of transaction fees being too low is of course top of mind for a
lot of Miners And if you go into mle dospace and you see these blocks that we've already mined with various projects were getting paid well above market rate and that's ultimately what that's the business of Bitcoin mining right it's you know it's not just about transaction fees right now it's the block reward too but as we enter into a world where that block word becomes um smaller and smaller this is the way to make money and it it again feeds perfectly into our Layer Two narrative
uh the goal is to increase the you know Revenue channels for mining companies and that can only be a benefit to the investors of s mining companies over like the last year or so just to jump in there how how have you guys been thinking about this because ordinals are about a year plus old at this point what was with the timing was it just take a while to build this out or was it like you know we want to do this before The Happening obviously Marathon was like plugging a lot of hash rate last year so maybe that was a priority
in general we've been looking at uh services like this transaction acceleration was the first thing we we went down the road of but I mean it really makes a lot less sense for us as a minor we don't have a ginormous share of the total hash rate there are other pools out there that can find a block much more quickly than us so we started thinking about generally speaking well what can we do and it's it's kind of funny uh again credit to this because it was mostly Portland Hud's initiative uh
so you know I don't I want to call him out but um the fact of the matter is what what are our strengths while our strengths are we run our own pool and if we run our own pool we can actually do something like this so this is something other public miners can't do you know um because they don't run their own pools so uh being able to have the pool and be able to shape and craft our own blocks and determine what goes inside them directly gives us the ability to do things like that and uh charge a premium
for the service love it okay let's transition over and talk about l2s you guys are working on so you guys announced I believe a little over a week ago L2 Network there's a lot of different feedback loops into how this works it's a mortgage mind Network so we can get into that Michael throw it over to you first just again describe the engineering for this product uh and then maybe later we'll describe how it kind of fits into the inscription game as well yeah yeah well what andur is at its core is it is a platform for side chains
um and it what it is is a uh it is a combination a hybrid of uh existing models one being a strong Federation like liquid and it's it's combined with uh proof of work merge mining right so ex auxiliary proof of work merge mining so so like namecoin or root stock or any of those and most importantly because it it I believe there hasn't been a true Bitcoin side chain yet by my personal definition because my personal definition is that a true Bitcoin side chain should have no other token than Bitcoin right so Bitcoin or derivative
specifically of Bitcoin that is pegged one to one Bitcoin uh and then that token also should be ex freely tradable so tradable and swappable any place uh outside so you don't have to go through the Federation to get in or out um and then the other thing about it is it must be merg mind and it must contribute back to L1 security which I think is the fundamental biggest problems with there's a slew of l2s about to hit the market and if you throw lightning Network on top of that the fact of the matter is practically none of them do
anything to pay back the minor so if you get tvl of trillions of dollars running on these things and you condense those down into small tiny little transactions where you're actually reconciling against uh the Bitcoin blockchain well the miners receive none of this incremental revenue for all of these massive flows going on these l2s so you know that distorts minor incentives which means it could become more profitable for miners to attack the network rather than to secure it so people talk a lot about the security
budget um the security budget to me isn't a number it's not about doubling and profitability security budget is one Satoshi more than the attack budget that's what the security budget needs to be right so but okay getting back to Enduro as a platform so it's vitally important that you know by my definition that you know any any true side chain of Bitcoin be merge mind pay back to L1 and be Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin right it's only Bitcoin um root stock has RF that's what you pay gas fees in in root stock
so because of that I think it is disqualified from my definition um and liquid of course uh they have a strong Federation they do not contribute to mining at all it's it's effectively a cartel right say they determine the prices um other defining characteristics of the platform uh Mev resistance is a fundamental uh aspirational feature of it um Mev resistance is very hard and uh it's an unsolvable problem in many ways on a decent ized platform but fortunately since we do have to live with a federation for the time being
which again it's another core tenant of the Enduro platform is to if possible move away from a Federated environment so BBM becomes a viable Peg mechanism we would much rather use a prer solution right but um but with regard to me resistance yeah it's it's an unsolvable problem in a truly decentralized environment but if you do have a federation there are things you can do to Garner an element of me resistance and we've worked a lot of these into uh the side chains on the Enduro platform of which you know initially we have two
that that we are currently in Alpha uh there is a Bitcoin style that we actually dubbed a coordinate and uh coordinate is a play of course of ordinals so you have your ordinal on bitcoin and you have your co- ordinal on on coordinate uh but yes um and and and ideally you'll be able to use Slipstream to pass through the Federation and they will issue you assets natively uh an utxo assets on uh the Bitcoin based is as a fork of Bitcoin core based coordinate chain and this is that that part of it's all based
on Paul sz's bit assets paper so um yeah I don't know it's about a six or seven year old paper not that many people are familiar with it like most things Paul does is brilliant so um but yeah minor modifications were made uh to update it make it feasible and then we added a bunch of other uh other Nuance to it allowing for Med resistance and pre-confirmation which so there's two ways to actually uh do a transaction on coordinate one way is traditional Bitcoin mining and then another way is through the
pre-confirmation mechanism and not quite sure how much time we have to get into the Weeds on that but okay so all right so for the pre uh pre-confirmation mechanism it actually gets really interesting so what we've what we've done is flipped the script on on how the user experience is with regard to fees um so the way it works in coordinate is uh for a given block or Epoch of the Federation so that part of it the pre consensus is done in in lock step time much like ethereum or anything else right so it's when they come to
consensus on over a period of time every single node on the network timestamps them when the pre-confirmation arrive and then they've timestamped them and then forward them on so every single node on the network has its own order of transactions that went through so it sees its own order now the nodes that go to the Federation members they each run their own node of course and they see things in a different order than not everybody else right so that all has to be reconciled right so you have the window of time from beginning of epoch
to end of your pocket and then in that window you can only fit so many transactions because you have a set amount of space so you're going to get necessarily if you have enough traffic there's a floor but if you have enough traffic you're going to get more transactions that can get place so what you do is you actually settle on the fee the fee is not known at the time it's settled in by the most transaction you can cram into that space paying the the fee amount to where you get the ideal yield fee by the way initially e plan is
uh 20% of the fee for these transactions goes to the Federation members to continue but 80% of this is a holdover for miners the minor that encapsulates this preconiran-food.com Federation does make money but that's kind of incidental just to keep the lights on keep everything running right and you know it's subject to change maybe we could even lower but um yeah so the pre-confirmation to pay a fee up to this amount right so that's all you ever enter and then that reserves your place in line for this
block and either you make it into this block say a one minute Epoch so either in a minute you've either made it into this or you have been rejected at which you can you can try again with a different amount see if that works but everybody who makes it into the block pays the exact same fee rate to get into that block and it's determined by the lowest fee rate of whoever made it into that block everybody else pays what they pay right so it's fair for that block um so but this is a an entirely new and
different ux one that we're not accustomed to one you know because if you're trying to get on a block and a Bitcoin style mining system or even ethereum you yes and then you bump and then you bump and then you bump and you're always worried you don't want to overpay here you can't overpay you you say okay I'm willing to pay up to this amount and it'll go through or fail atomically so and when we get back to Mev resistance of course meev resistance is all about ordering transaction
ordering and doing a fair ordering a fair job reconciling order right of course this is a ad decentralized system I don't want to say supremely decentralized because federations are not super decentralized but it's not centralized so you're going to have different orders right so the best that you can do to enable me resistance is this so first and for most the legal contractual agreements that any Federation member would sign or Collective I'm sorry I use that term Federation because it's ingrained but
we're calling it a collective any Collective member will legally agree that they will not play any Mev games reordering transactions from what their node actually natively receives on the network so there is that which again that's trusted so you can't really trust that so what do you do to actually enforce it and enable it right so the answer to this is you um the the Federation members each get their own ordered list and then they limit the set to the ones that they're going to do they select the
fee limit set further based on the ones who meit the the fee threshold then they take their order and submit it to their nodes and those get broadcast they sign it and they are broadcast throughout the network so all of the nodes individually look at all the Federation members order and they run a very small reconciliation algorithm you know that just takes the order and it just basically takes the median so it takes the median of it and then it tie breaks uh you know several different ways it uses a couple
different ways to say okay there's a couple that saw it earlier so that moves it up in score and there's a couple that saw it later so that moves it down and score and then everybody collapses down on this one canonical order right and that canonical order goes back to the Federation and then by pbft quorum consensus it's signed off on and then that becomes the actual order of the block so if no disagrees with the order then they can't really do anything because the Federation at the end of the day is
a bully and can say this is the actual order of the block live with it but what they can do is they can publicly tell everybody else no I can tell by my note that they changed this order and they they deliberately did this you know because I can see through my note and everybody else who runs a node can see that too so by social consensus if there is some chicanery going on with the federator it will become very obvious and so um like I said you can't really solve the problem of me resistance but what you can do is you can make it
obvious that it's happening and promise not to do it and then make that a condition for using it so so that's that's about the best you're going to get in the competitive world of Bitcoin mining one name stands out cleanspark America's Bitcoin minor at cleanspark efficiency isn't just a goal it's our standard our sophisticated facilities are built and led by expert teams who care about Bitcoin and the communities we work in scale we've mastered it our large scale operations have set us apart in the
industry as examples of community oriented building our track record speaks for itself we navigate the complexities of the new economy with precision and with skill continuously achieving operational Milestones curious about how we do it we invite you to discover the story behind cleanspark success at cleanspark docomo is really interesting and and for background for audience members we've done a decent amount of shows I think on both ethereum me and Bitcoin me over the the length of this podcast excuse me but
for those listening it's all about about like how is your transaction being ordered within a block is it going to be placed within a block where is it going to be placed in a block and then what sort of applications outside of Bitcoin are dependent on the transaction ordering so if you're using a DEX and you're trying to land a transaction on a DEX for a certain time period or Price moment and your transaction gets moved somewhere in the block where someone else's place ahead of you well they can
extract value from you by either the price moving or uh maybe the minor comes in and sort of sneaks around so it's certainly like very important that MV is taken care of how are you guys thinking of this as it evolves is me going to be something that you guys like keep pressing like this legal button on so I'd say the the important thing to consider with endur just taking a quick step back is why all of this matters right like why are we building this layer two and what does this mean for the blockchain the future of blockchain
adoption so I think meev is part of that it is a well-known problem across the ethereum and the ethereum layer 2 space B and we don't just want to create a layer two in Bitcoin that's you know agnostic or let's say like ton deaf to what's going on in other layer twos but it's one of a suite of different offerings that um that that we're attempting with Enduro so just to clarify it's a multi-chain stack right and in terms of why this Bitcoin native definition matters that that Mike is
talking about is there's a real impact on the user experience and when it comes to things like Mev like this is one of the one of many different things that we were considering we want to create a layer two where the user experience is top of the line right where somebody is working on bitcoin where they're benefiting from that appeal where they're benefiting from that security of Bitcoin but we on top of that they are able to transact in a way that they're not being front run by this you know
Consortium of entities we call the collective you know we're recruiting members of the collective and that is of course some you know something that you know we're also a part of but at the end of the day we do want to create a layer to where there is this consensus of you know trust don't verify or sorry verify don't trust my bad but the goal with Mev is like this is one problem that you see a lot which is you have these like big um big Network actors coming in and and yeah basically you know worsening the
user experience for other for other members so I'd say Mev is one part of it but if you're talking about the longer vision of Enduro it's much bigger than Mev and it's even much bigger than you know a particular side chain itself at the end of the day it's how can we abstract away developer complexities you know because that's the number one thing with any Layer Two that is created and I can go on and list a number of layer twos but that's not NE necessary right at the end of the day every single layer
two most layer twos that are created try to innovate the stack and I think when the second you innovate the stack you start getting into big problems where now developers have a learning curve that's why we have two side chains to begin with a Bitcoin like one and an ethereum virtual machine like one idea there being developer complexities abstracted number two this Mev resistance it's an important point at the end of the day you can't have a lot of trading use cases without front running being prohibited and what's
number three well you have also a Bitcoin native asset it doesn't just matter for the Bitcoin community it matters for the user because if I have to buy a new token on top of already using your new chain man why would I do that like you're asking for that that's a friction and then the last bit in terms of the merge mining why even pay the layer one for security well at the end of the day if this layer two ends up becoming some massive thing it'll be like a chicken without a head right it's
going to be completely untethered and we want to create layer twos that benefit from that security of Bitcoin but you know this is also the important bit where users know that it is tied to bitcoin you can't Define Bitcoin without proof of work and so we wanted to create a layer two that does that as well but there are many other features in the road map many of which I'm sure um yeah and we're always open to hearing more you know of users hey man I use this layer to on bitcoin or ethereum whatever
and I had this problem that's what endur is here to solve awesome so what sort of like DS or applications are you guys hoping are built on top of this layer to I'm assuming that's one of the biggest Ambitions here since some layer twos are like payment networks and that's about it but it does seem like there could be more here right yeah no there's like I said multi- chain so really like the goal is every side chain that we create create is multi-purpose from the get-go right we're not we're not in the
business of creating app chains or like something something super specific no and so coordinate the the chain that that Mike was talking about the one that's Bitcoin like that's Backward Compatible with Bitcoin there's a number of different use cases I should clarify before I jump into them that every chain we're creating is permissionless so marathon in the same way that we're not trying to be prescriptive about the demand that goes through slipstream we're definitely not trying to be
prescriptive about the demand that goes through Enduro we're creating these chains and we have these theor but at the end of the day let's see where the community takes it but in the case of coordinate you have a few things that are possible there's of course the fact that inscriptions any sort of inscription activity ordinals brc2 on the main chain will at some point get priced out and actually it's not even I'm I'm I'm not some you know like uh what is it I'm not some fortune teller
um this has already been happening we work with a lot of these ordinal teams and they've been telling us for the past six months every time that the fees start spiking they say things like oh I can't Min a collection I can't do anything you know I'm stuck right so the number one thing that we wanted a build coordinate for is serve as a layer where you can Port over these ordinals these BRC 20s these runes whatever you might say is on the main chain currently and you can use them and even access some
additional features on coordinate itself that I believe could really help stimulate um a world in which ordinals are even adopted by institutions or maybe they're just adopted by a broader retail base you know it's built coordinate is built to be faster it's built to be cheaper than Bitcoin that's obvious because it's a layer two um but yeah that that's that's one bit second bit ironically enough um you know in terms of the layer twos that exist or you know the scaling Solutions broadly
speaking that exist today a lot of people talk about the lightning network but one of the biggest issues with the lightning network is channel Logistics right you have to open a channel to pay and you got to close it in order to settle well hey guess what you know Channel opening and closing those are transactions right and on main chain that can be easily too expensive it's probably too expensive right now but what happens on coordinate all of a sudden opening and closing a channel becomes cheaper opening and closing a
channel Channel becomes cheaper oh sorry faster and now you have a new layer upon which you could actually use the lightning Network so that's coordinate we'll put that out get it back to bitcoin with submarine swaps yeah exactly so that's coordinate Alice which is the second chain that that we're building they're both an alpha at the moment which comes out first is really anybody's guess but they're they're both heading toward an open Beta period Alice is an evm stack so that means you have
ethereum Smart contracts but the native asset is still Bitcoin and the consensus is still a majority dominated by proof of work so what is Alice built to do right because the in terms of the tech stack it's obviously not differentiated from any of these other EVMS that are coming out the goal is institutions I think with Marathon what you know one of the biggest Reas one of the biggest things or advantages rather that we have in this layer 2 space is there's no other big layer two coming out that's
backed by a massive institution with people who you know what I mean know how to approach you know like comparable institutions who are blue chip compatible to put it a different way you're also not seeing any other Layer Two that's going to definitively exist in the next 5 years you know some of these other layer tws that are coming out they're Venture they're Venture funded you know are they going to be around in the next two years who knows some of the biggest layer twos in ethereum it's still a question mark as
to whether they'll exist in the next three years now I'm mentioning this and it goes back to your point about use cases because at the end of the day if you're an Institutional decision maker and you're thinking of tokenizing a real world asset starting a loyalty program engaging your customers through new channels doing whatever deepin you you name the the use case you going to do that on a chain that's definitively going to exist on a chain that's reliable and that's fundamentally what I
believe Alice brings to the table is most developers out there and most teams are thinking of building ethereum like smart contracts all right you know we'll throw you a bone but let's get them onto the Bitcoin Network where things are much more institution grade that's the goal for ordinals and runes and other things that want to Port over to one of these layers what does that look like is it going going to be like a wrapped asset like we've seen with ethereum and Bitcoin or is it going to be the ability
to do like a 2A Peg where you actually have the asset moving over completely and it can go back down to the Bitcoin based layer if that's what you want to do with it yeah it would be a two-way pick man managed by the collective of course like the rest of the pegged asset the Bitcoin going in it would be a special you know the ordinals are kept in special wallets where they're segregated and the asset that's created on the side chain actually the goal is to be able to do it on any of the side chains so you could do it to the evm as
well where it would effectively act like a wrapped asset in a smart contract or you could do it on the coordinate utxo chain where in that chain you actually issue uh it's it's the entirety of the utxo model the only difference is you add another element to that model to say okay this output is of this type so you have a type associated with it being an nft or a token um and then there's one other uh one other flag that you have is is this asset Bitcoin mainchain native right so you could be you could create
assets on the side chain that are side chain native but only the Federation can create Bitcoin or Collective rather can create uh Bitcoin native assets and the only way that that can be done is by locking them up on bitcoin and you know of course if you destroy burn the asset by giving it back to the collective then that freeze it up on the other side of love it okay I want to go into like a more General philosophical debate about like these different chains we're seeing pop up so historically we've seen a few
things come out Stacks has their thing uh you mentioned I think root sock earlier there's been a lot of these different ideas for like how to make miners be participants in a layer to that is you know incentivize for miners long term but also allows you to have more expressivity on a second layer nothing's really taken off to date right now we're seeing explosion of different projects I mean I'm seeing decks and Deals be pass around to mainstream crypto investors for a lot of these projects right now which means that it's
you know it's hot L2 C's on bitcoin is a Hot Topic how do you guys think about the underlying security or premise of this Chain versus the other ones that you're seeing out there and then in general where do you guys look at this and be like oh we're at our end point here we like where we're at I know Mike used it earlier like bit BM would probably be something you guys would like you know fraud proof that would be more beneficial than anything else but in general how do you guys feel about
some of like the uh trade-offs here on the technical side of of things Michael thir to you first yeah personally I view the feder Federation model strong Federation model as a necessary evil for the time being um there's lots of other chains that use you know ZK proofs the fact of the matter is that Bitcoin main Chain's not set up to handle so um you can't really do anything that's truly truly zero knowledge like you can on ethereum or any other tr complete with the present state of Bitcoin um that being said there are a
bunch of softwork proposals and of course bitm which again though I don't I don't think it's in a usable State I don't think it will be in a usable state for quite some time if that changes I'd love to incorporate it directly but uh as to the differentiators between the other l2s um I would say one of the biggest things is we we do not have a token like we have no fundrais token that we're putting up all the tokens that we have are Bitcoin no no no native token exists on the Chain except for Bitcoin that
will be locked up and spawned on the Chain there is no uh asset issuance schedule there's no reward subsidy there is only fees that is all that exists on any of these chains are fees right and you can create whatever tokens you want but the native token it's just fees just Bitcoin um furthermore we we don't offer and we don't purport to offer any form of yield for for anything that we're doing we're not promising oh okay give us your Bitcoin and we'll give you more Bitcoin that is not the deal here you
see that a lot going around everybody's promising yield everybody wants yield on bitcoin that's not what this is about and I think longterm anything that the promises yield in a depreciating asset is ultimately doomed so or sorry a deflationary asset yes yeah it's a tricky tricky subject there with the the yield seeing a lot of projects come out right now around that from uh unless you want to jump in there Julian I do want to Pivot to talking about like how miners can participate in this talk about the Federation and that seems to
be like adjacent to it or maybe you could kind of clear up how like the Federation and then like merge mining work together on this because I'm assuming you're trying to incentivize miners outside of marathon to participate in merge mining yeah they are fundamentally related and I think if if you think about a differentiator between what Enduro is and and what other layer tws um try to do is that we're ultimately rewarding main chain with a Bitcoin denominated asset um it's something that if you say um to a lot of
these other layer dues they'll they'll admit that's the case and yet you dive into the technical doc you don't have to go that deep and immediately you see that the miners are getting rewarded in some you know altcoin assets something that isn't Peg to bitcoin or you know they'll find creative ways to loop around the subject but at the end of the day as a minor if you want to be part of Enduro you are going to get paid a Bitcoin denominated asset via proof of work the same type of proof of work that
you are already performing your machines you can repurpose them to mine both Bitcoin and Enduro in every single s in Enduro without any extra additional um energy consumption and really just via simple API integration and that matters because at the end of the day you if you want a network that's properly decentralized you have to follow the same or rather reward the same incentives behind decentralization that underly the Bitcoin Network and so Bitcoin compatiability we embed that at the core layer of what every single
Enduro side chain is all about now connecting that a little bit to you know why do these other Bitcoin layer twos the ones that have existed and the ones that do exist why the none have taken off and why most probably will not I think it comes down to that you know because at the end of the day we we kind of just assume that we can red hair uh user oh it's Bitcoin it's a Bitcoin layer too oh but you have a new token oh there's no there's no mining whatsoever oh and on top of that like this network
is just totally different in XYZ users aren't stupid you know it's very easy to get a sense from these projects that okay what I'm on right now is truly not Bitcoin it this feels you know I hesitate to say a scam because I'm not saying that these other layer twos are necessarily scams but if you're a bitcoiner and you have Bitcoin all right like you're you're going to be extra cautious with that and you're not just going to take a promise of 5% 10% you know reaking yield as as a given you
know you're you're probably going to think about it a little bit more so I think that's a really big reason but I think another big reason is you're talking about a lot of these layer tws are just dominated and just totally focused on very narrow communities you know as opposed to Thinking Beyond you know thinking from the you know entire landscape of the Bitcoin world but even beyond the Bitcoin world as well very very few projects even get to the former you know they they they target a very
particular set of Bitcoin users the ones that are willing to get yield in some altcoin on top of their Bitcoin right very few will extend beyond that and what we really want to do with Enduro the multi-chain aspect to it is how can we extend to a community that goes beyond and maybe even you know normies to some degree right because I think it's only when you begin thinking on that dimension on the dimension of all right let's think beyond what blockchain currently is to what it could be that's when you start getting some really great
following and it's something that you see in a lot of other layer twos that are created in other networks they're thinking bigger you know this Bitcoin Layer Two narrative the fact that it's you know it's it's at Vogue it's definitely in Vogue when you're talking about Bitcoin audiences but outside of Bitcoin most people don't even know that's going on right so I think there's there's a big there there's a big responsibility we've put on our plate which is how can we keep this as Bitcoin
native as possible but on top of that make this message something that's more Global and make it something that's more cross applicable that that's the challenge that I think no other Bitcoin layer to has solved or is even trying to solve we're being honest love it I mean the pitch is very strong here from a a mining perspective and a bitcoin's perspective what does it look like to try to onboard people what's sort of the pitch people I think the monetary incentives obviously will speak for
themselves over time as like you know projects jump on to it but certainly there was a lot of push back or a lot of Twitter chatter on at first when this popped up you can excuse a lot of that just being you know bitcoiners are skeptical and they don't really trust anything but going forward like I assume for a business perspective you guys want to convince people to be a part of this and build on top of it so how are you guys going around that marketing SLB part of this yeah forming Partnerships and forming relationships that most
people wouldn't expect out of a Bitcoin layer 2 um you know a lot of other Bitcoin layer twos have had to fight to and nail for really basic infrastructure like exchange listings or custodian support or like Oracle support and we're finding that even within the first what eight days nine days of announcing Enduro we're getting a lot of the top projects a lot of top infrastructure players reaching out to us and wanting to engage with us in these conversations and to see oh how can we support these
assets you know you guys are actually giving a new a differentiated pitch and I think that's telling you know because a lot of these other layer twos would die to have like the best Bridges the best oracles the best custodians try to support them and we're already having we're already in late stages in all of these sort of on all of these Dimensions I think that kind of shows you that Bitcoin layer 2 generally speaking is in need of a new narrative but it also shows that given that we have not just
centered the pitch over simple yield or like you know some altcoin we've actually made the yield about utility right what more can you do how can we extend the functionality of Bitcoin not just how can we extend the money-making capabilities although of course that's part of it right we're building a layer two in blockchain after all right it's this isn't you know some non-speculative industry there's going to be speculation but how can we in other words pitch to these Skeptics in a way that they don't
immediately throw it out the window so I think the Bitcoin denominated yield for miners is really big one that gets in the mining community and the fact that we're a big minor they're signaling there right like if you're a smaller minor and you look to Marathon as an example and here marathon is building and merge mining a layer two chances are you're going to do so as well right so that that Community set on the community of users it's totally a function of developers and I think the fact that
we're providing a multi-chain stack with a number of different Frameworks and many many more to come that means any developer there's no learning curve right you want to approach Bitcoin you don't have to relearn Bitcoin script or if you are an expert in Bitcoin coin script you don't have to learn evm right you've got everything that you need there and then the last bit of course would be that infrastructure and again the infrastructure it's often times if we're being honest it's a question of
money you know some of the biggest institutions are not willing to give their infrastructure out for free but it's also a question of focus and it's also a question of status a question of you know reach and I think that's something that we're already seeing this project in the very early stages um yeah get to a level that it's unexpected to some degree because again the history of Bitcoin layer twos is a pretty unremarkable one um but in other ways it is expected you know what I mean like we
didn't we we haven't started you heard Mike explain what uro is this is a network that has come after many many months of very deep thought and very deep debates so it's it's a well-thought network I think it's a Well pitched Network and I think that's resonating with a lot of top institutions that for better for worse you need them you need a market maker you need you know a liquidity provider you need a lot of this like basic stuff that these other l2s they can only hope that retail or
that the Reddit post gets them on the M on on the map right we we don't have to necessarily scr for that that sort of demand love it I mean yeah about a year ago I talk with Fred at the Bitcoin ski Summit which is happening right now um so I think it's almost like a year to that conversation and we talked about havening coming up and how Bitcoin miners especially the large ones were going to have to become creative and start thinking about ways of making Revenue outside of traditional ways and I think we've seen that with the energy
Market where a lot of these Bitcoin miners have been you know hedging building alternative lines of Revenue there and I think on the hosting side we've seen a lot of that um and now we're seeing it here with you know this Bitcoin Tech stack and I like this part though because it's like it's built into mining there's more incentives for everyone to be aligned with it uh and then of course like we need a better scaling solution I think like this bare Market ended a little faster than people
expected and now we have high bitcoin price we have a very bloated utx H set and we don't have a lot of great scaling Solutions um I'll give it to you guys for for final thoughts here as we wrap up or Mike any any final thoughts to leave our viewership with yeah just on the platform I would say just reiterate the the twit objectives is one increase and enhance the actual utility and usability of the Bitcoin ecosystem allow Bitcoin to do more new and interesting things for more people that's one of the
goals the other goal is to provide Revenue back to bitcoin miners at the end of the day marathon's in this because we're a minor and we want more incremental fee Revenue so uh and again I will say this is open to all miners uh via merge Mining and we intend to make that as easy as possible through uh integrated apis such that any minor can plug in the oxp uh very easily into their apparatus I mean we're still building all that out primarily we're only working with our own pool now but it is open to all it is
not to be closed it's not something Marathon doing just uh for ourselves the other thing that I will say that Marathon does bring to the table uh being a a sizable minor is we can effectively guarantee that we will have some degree of timely no matter what the market does Peg outs from this back to bitcoin because we do actually create blocks and we can prioritize Peg outs from these chains which is something a lot of l2s can't say especially if we go into a bull run and you start seeing these get very very hectic if they do
not have their own hash rate they're going to have a real hard time finding it un block so um yeah so that that pretty much rounds it out for my my stuff only thing I'll add is the the incentive for us to succeed is as Mike has mentioned not a token um the incentive for us to succeed has nothing to do with a venture raise we didn't we didn't Venture raise for this or right we're a publicly listed company this is this effort and where it's going is purely a question of marathon and you
know it's close part balance sheets the incentive to succeed is utility at the end of the day if this thing isn't active if we don't see transaction volume if we don't see fees being generated then it's been a failure and I think that different that creates uh what I believe is the incentive for this to succeed in a new way or for this product to be differentiated because we don't have to worry about the token or network of venture capitalist or like pure speculation it means that we can
actually innovate how blockchain is actually adopted generally speaking how Bitcoin in particular tied in to a vast number of you know technological applications be they things that the blockchain or the broader you know Community is talking now or be they things that they're not you know even expecting so I think for me what what excites me most about Enduro is that it has genuinely Bitcoin compatible incentives but it also just has incentives that'll make it um I think a robust Network um and the goal is to
really make it robust in a way that sounds and feels different from the slew of l2s that that you know everybody's hearing um coming out into the world and so for the miners out there that you know we're miners we get pitched you know last week was pitched by five different different um what is it layer ones and layer twos asking oh Marathon merge Minar chain look sure other miners listening have that same exact situation at the end of the day say no to most of those things you know at the end of the
day like they're they're bitching you an asset whose value is very indeterminant the pitch Enduro gives to minors is we'll pay you in Bitcoin all right or Bitcoin denominated asset rather you know the we're paying you in that it is Bitcoin proper it is not we want be very clear about that but it is Bitcoin denominated and it isly and so Bitcoin denominated asset that's the reward here at the end of the day um it only succeeds if there is actual volume on the chain and because of that I think
it's going to be the the most robust of the the layer twos that exists and at the end of the day it's here to stay whether we like it or we don't there's enough money put into this thing that it's you know it's going to be the most stable and also the most robust layer to out there that that I'm sure of awesome Julian Mike thanks for joining talk about this probably one of the better Tech pods we've had in a bit so appreciate your guys' time of course thanks a lot will
