Marathon Announced yesterday Second class suggestion from Anduro. Although there aren't any fundamentally new parts or developments in the Anduro design, it is composed in slightly different ways compared to other sidechain systems like RSK or Liquid/Elements.
Anduro is a standardized model that uses a quorum, referred to as “the quorum” in the issued documents. The main difference between Anduro and other Sidechain proposals is the clear design based on collective operation and the ability to rotate and manage multiple sidechains with different architectures. This is not very different from the concept of chain of command which allows a broader network of side chains, rather than a single network.
Anduro will also be integrated, which, like RSK (which also uses federated peg), does not offer any kind of additional security for Bitcoin tied to the sidechain maintained by the federation. However, it, also like RSK, provides POW security for other assets that may be issued on the sidechain that are not linked to the main chain and are guarded by the consortium.
Wedge and consensus model
The actual connection between the main chain and the sidechain is essentially the same as Liquid, and in detail it looks almost identical in terms of structure and implementation. The pool will launch with 15 members as employees, the entities that actually handle the multiple keys involved in managing the peg, and 50 or more contributors, who appear to be similar to liquid partial members who can whitelist and initiate withdrawals from the sidechain(s). ) even though they are not an active participant in processing those withdrawals.
Also like Liquid, Anduro will also use a formal organization to handle governance matters. For example, dealing with network upgrades, deciding on future changes to the federation's membership group, and generally any issues that will arise regarding the operation of sidechains that the collective group is working on. The security of the union ultimately depends on judicial diversity in order to maintain any kind of resistance to censorship or safety from seizure of funds even though the union is composed of honest members.
The interesting part of the design here is that, unlike RSK, the collective plays an active role in the consensus process beyond facilitating the operations of the binding mechanism. In Anduro, the group already reaches consensus on the block contents of the sidechain through the Byztanine Fault Tolerant (BFT) algorithm or round robin selection where one member builds the blocks for that round. They also periodically sign blocks to act as a checkpoint system to prevent anything in the historical past from being rearranged. Once signed and verified, miners are unable to reorganize any side blocks without crowd assistance.
Both of these factors essentially act as a firewall between extractable value opportunities for miners and miners. An MEV is any opportunity available to miners where rearranging transactions, such as forward running orders on a decentralized exchange, can provide an opportunity for that miner to earn additional revenue when they mine the next block. MEV has shown a tendency to increase centralization pressures for block producers in other networks in which it has become prevalent. Given the fact that the collective actually decides the contents of the side blocks, and that miners simply commit to them with proof of work, the collective acts as a shield against those centralizing pressures that block producers (in the case of Bitcoin miners) are exposed to by acting as the actual block builder. .
Longer term, Marathon states that they intend to work towards trustless binding and consensus mechanisms, specifically citing BitVM as an example of how this can be achieved. While this raises doubts about the ability to maintain the MEV protection provided by the current architecture in such a transition, it currently prevents MEV from presenting the risk of central pressures to miners. It is also important to note that ultimately BitVM, as designed using a verification model, inherently requires specific participants to manage any funds locked in a BitVM peg. While it radically improves the security model of pegging by allowing dishonest participants to be punished by a single member, massive changes to the design of BitVM itself would be necessary to completely remove the need for the equivalent of a federation.
Overall, the architecture strikes a good balance between implementing a variety of existing sidechain designs, while in its current version deliberately creating a kind of protective layer between the sidechain and miners when it comes to MEV risks.
First Monday
At launch, Anduro will have support for two sidechains, one based on Bitcoin and the other on Ethereum.
Coordinates: Coordinates is the side version of Bitcoin. It will implement small changes to Bitcoin, including native support for asset issuance similar to Liquid, and intends to cater to Ordinals, token use cases like BRC-20, and the primitive DeFi products and services that have built up around it.
Alys: Alys is the replacement for the Ethereum sidechain, and is basically just moving the Ethereum Virtual Machine and Solidity to the Bitcoin sidechain. The hope is that it could provide a new learning curve environment for Ethereum application developers to shift their focus toward building services and tools on top of Bitcoin.
