🎉 Gate xStocks Trading is Now Live! Spot, Futures, and Alpha Zone – All Open!
📝 Share your trading experience or screenshots on Gate Square to unlock $1,000 rewards!
🎁 5 top Square creators * $100 Futures Voucher
🎉 Share your post on X – Top 10 posts by views * extra $50
How to Participate:
1️⃣ Follow Gate_Square
2️⃣ Make an original post (at least 20 words) with #Gate xStocks Trading Share#
3️⃣ If you share on Twitter, submit post link here: https://www.gate.com/questionnaire/6854
Note: You may submit the form multiple times. More posts, higher chances to win!
📅 July 3, 7:00 – July 9,
Thunderbolt protocol: Redefining Bitcoin off-chain interactions to enhance scalability and programmability.
The design logic of the Bitcoin Lightning Network and the innovation of the Thunderbolt Network
First, the transaction efficiency problem faced by Bitcoin
As a decentralized and immutable cryptocurrency, Bitcoin faces the problems of long transaction confirmation time and high transaction fees in daily payment scenarios. This is mainly due to Bitcoin's conservative script structure design, which restricts most off-chain interaction scenarios. However, there has always been a demand for fast, low-cost transactions, which has prompted the exploration of more efficient payment solutions.
! Re-examine the design logic of the Bitcoin Lightning Network from the Thunderbolt network
2. Lightning Network: Advantages and Limitations
The Lightning Network is a solution proposed to solve the problem of transaction efficiency on the Bitcoin main chain. It achieves high-frequency bookkeeping by establishing an exclusive "payment channel" between users, and finally synchronizes the state of funds to the blockchain only when the channel is closed. This model is similar to settling accounts at once after accumulating consumption between friends.
However, the Lightning Network exposes multiple dilemmas in practical applications:
These structural flaws make it difficult for Lightning Network applications to break through bottlenecks. At present, the amount of funds locked in the entire Lightning Network is only at the level of about $100 million, which is insignificant compared to the trillion-dollar market capitalization of Bitcoin.
! Revisit the design logic of the Bitcoin Lightning Network from the Thunderbolt network
3. Thunderbolt Protocol: Reconstructing Bitcoin off-chain interactions
Thunderbolt is a soft fork upgrade solution based on the Bitcoin base layer, aimed at fundamentally enhancing Bitcoin's scalability, transaction performance, and programmability.
3.1 Core Mechanism
The design concept of Thunderbolt includes:
3.2 Key Innovations
4. Comparison of Thunderbolt with Existing Lighting Network Solutions
The main advantages of Thunderbolt are in terms of security and theoretical completeness. It allows the protocol to be designed to be provably secure, and malicious users cannot unilaterally profit from any state.
However, Thunderbolt also has some disadvantages:
5. The Potential Impact and Development Path of Thunderbolt
As the theoretical preferred solution for BTCFi, Thunderbolt may have three paths for its future development:
The greatest significance of Thunderbolt lies in enabling Bitcoin assets to possess "off-chain contract composability" for the first time. The introduction of two key features, UTXO Bundling and OP_CAT, brings native programmability and higher on-chain throughput to the Bitcoin network. This creates possibilities for unifying Bitcoin ecological protocols, accommodating various assets, and implementing more complex on-chain applications.
While Thunderbolt has shown great potential, it is still in the early stages of research. There may be some distance before developers can use it widely. Future development will depend on the further improvement of the technology and the gradual construction of the ecosystem.
! Starting from the Thunderbolt network, re-examine the design logic of the Bitcoin Lightning Network