TL;DR Wanchain’s latest Bitcoin Bridge upgrade is live. This upgrade bolsters security, increases privacy, improves efficiency and reduces costs without sacrificing decentralisation.
Bitcoin stands as the world’s preeminent cryptocurrency. Initially dismissed, Bitcoin gained traction as a decentralised, trustless peer-to-peer platform to facilitate the exchange of digital value. Its importance extends beyond its contributions to state-of-the-art cryptography and innovative consensus mechanisms. Bitcoin embodies a cultural and philosophical transformation, challenging established institutions and their role in society.
Bitcoin’s history reflects both its technical resilience and its impact on decentralising power. A few highlights:
- 2008: Satoshi Nakamoto publishes the Bitcoin whitepaper.
- 2009: Bitcoin, the first decentralised cryptocurrency, leverages blockchain technology and sparks a revolution.
- 2012: The first BTC halving occurs, reducing block rewards from 50 BTC to 25 BTC.
- 2014: The first Bitcoin hard fork takes place.
- 2015: The number of merchants accepting BTC surpassed 1,000,000.
- 2017: Bitcoin’s market cap crosses USD 1 Billion for the first time.
- 2019: BTC’s dominance in the cryptocurrency market reaches 70%.
- 2021: Wanchain releases the industry’s first direct decentralised cross-chain bridge connecting Bitcoin and Ethereum. El Salvador becomes the first country to make BTC legal tender. BTC reaches its all-time high price of $68,789.63.
- 2022: More than 90% of Bitcoin’s max supply of 21 million is in circulation. Fewer than 10% of BTC is left to be mined.
- 2023: Wanchain launches BTC XFlows, enabling native-to-native cross-chain transformations between BTC on Bitcoin and many of the most popular BTC-backed assets including BTC.b on Avalanche, BTCB on BNB Chain, wanBTC on Wanchain and WBTC on Ethereum.
Bitcoin’s history is marked by incremental improvements. The same is true for Wanchain and its industry-leading decentralised cross-chain infrastructure. Continuous refinement is a hallmark of good projects. This approach to development enhances a protocol’s performance and security. It also ensures that a project can withstand changing demands and remain competitive in an ever-changing landscape. With this background in mind, the Wanchain team is happy to share that the latest upgrade to Wanchain’s industry leading Bitcoin Bridge is now live!
Taproot 🚰🌱
One key improvement introduced in this upgrade is full Taproot support, integrating the functionalities of Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade. The ultimate objective of Taproot is to make Bitcoin faster, more efficient and private. It introduces three primary improvements, namely:
- Schnorr Signatures (BIP340): Schnorr signatures offer enhanced security and flexibility with a smaller on-chain footprint. By incorporating “key aggregation,” Schnorr enables both multisig transactions and smart contracts to record the same amount of data to the Bitcoin blockchain as standard, single signature transactions.
- Taproot (BIP341): Taproot implements Merkelized Alternative Script Trees (MAST). MAST requires only the executed conditions of a smart contract transaction to be recorded on the blockchain, which reduces the amount of data that needs to be recorded on-chain and provides additional privacy to users. MAST also helps with scalability since unexecuted transaction information is no longer recorded on-chain.
- Tapscript (BIP 342): Tapscript is an update to the Script coding language used to write Bitcoin transaction parameters. It is designed to accommodate Schnorr Signatures and Taproot.
These improvements benefit all users who perform cross-chain BTC transactions using bridge.wanchain.org, as they combine to enhance the security, efficiency and flexibility of Wanchain’s Bitcoin Bridge without sacrificing decentralisation. This upgrade applies to all transactions involving the Bitcoin network — whether it be a BTC XFlows transaction or a lock-and-mint transaction resulting in an asset wrapped by the Wanchain Bridge (e.g., BTC on Cardano).
uniMPC 🌐👥🔐🧠
Another key improvement of this upgrade is that it standardizes Wanchain’s cross-chain Multi-Party Computation (MPC) signature interface, creating a unified MPC, or uniMPC. Previously, different blockchain architecture demanded different MPC signature interfaces, consuming significant operational resources and necessitating upgrades to the Wanchain Bridge (Storeman) Nodes every time a new public chain was integrated.
Now that the MPC signature interface is standardised across all chains, integrating new chains — in particular EVM-compatible chains — will usually not require an upgrade to the Bridge (Storeman) Nodes. This improvement also reduces the burden on Wanchain Bridge (Storeman) Node operators, since there will be less frequent upgrades.
In this era marked by fast-paced technological evolution, Wanchain remains steadfast in its commitment to pioneering and innovating state-of-the-art cross-chain technology to cater to the needs of both Wanchain users as well as the wider blockchain community. This latest Bitcoin Bridge Upgrade takes the industry’s best Bitcoin Bridge and makes it even better by bolstering security, increasing privacy, improving efficiency and reducing costs.
About Wanchain
We are all connected — Wanchain, the Wide Area Network chain, is the world’s premier decentralised blockchain interoperability solution. Our mission is to drive blockchain adoption through interoperability by building fully decentralised bridges that connect the world’s many siloed blockchain networks. This cross-chain infrastructure empowers developers to build truly decentralised cross-chain applications to power the future of Web3.
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