Bitcoin L2 Ecosystem Gets A Major Boost As Mintlayer Goes Live

Mintlayer is officially live. The Bitcoin sidechain, or L2, released its genesis block on January 29, easing the network into life and opening the door to a wave of decentralized finance applications that are anchored to Bitcoin. With backers including Charlie Shrem, who advises the project, onboard, Mintlayer has generated a lot of interest from day one. Now, the community can finally trial the sidechain for themselves.

Mintlayer Arrives at Last

It’s taken a lot of work to reach the day when the Genesis block could be published but Mintlayer’s architects are convinced the toil was all worth it. The greatest evidence of what Mintlayer can bring to L2 innovation on Bitcoin will be discovered further down the line, once DeFi apps have taken shape. For now, though, the Mintlayer community is just happy to have reached the milestone of the sidechain successfully going live. 

There are certain characteristics of Mintlayer that will be familiar to Bitcoin users, such as reliance on a UTXO model rather than the account-based system that characterizes most smart contract chains. But there’s also a lot that’s very different, such as a consensus that combines components of PoW and PoS. Rather than mining blocks using high-powered ASICs, block signers run light hardware that gives everyone a roughly equal chance of guessing the next block.

Atomic Swaps Instead of Risky Bridges

One of the greatest challenges when designing a smart contract network is allowing innovation to flourish and tokenization to occur without introducing security holes. Many a network has been crippled due to major exploits of bridges or wrapped tokens, deterring adoption and setting development back years. Mindful of this, Mintlayer has been designed to use Atomic Swaps instead.

Once they are live, Atomic Swaps will provide a highly secure way of swapping tokens on Mintlayer and it is expected that DEXes and other protocols will spring up on the Bitcoin sidechain that take advantage of this capability. In terms of security, Mintlayer also supports non-Turing complete smart contracts. This reduces the likelihood of exploits occurring by limiting developers to a set of specific functions.

ML Makes Its Mintlayer Debut

It’s not just the Mintlayer network that’s made its mainnet debut with the publishing of the genesis block: so has the ML token. It’s used for staking to secure Mintlayer. Now that Mintlayer is live, ML tokens will be awarded to the publisher of new blocks, something which occurs every two minutes on average. Token emissions will taper off over a period of 10 years. 

The potential use cases for Mintlayer remain open to third party developers to interpret. In other words, it can theoretically be used in any way to achieve anything. DeFi is the most obvious use case, and it seems likely that the fledgling apps to launch on Mintlayer will provide such primitives as lending, borrowing, trading, and stablecoin collateralization.

Mintlayer’s architects are also making a pitch for RWA tokenzation, however, and are optimistic that institutions may wish to create products for tokenizing assets such as real estate, equity, and art. Finally, it’s likely that NFTs will also be issued on Mintlayer and this may evolve into a cornerstone of the network’s utility. All that will be decided in the future; for now, the Mintlayer is community is just excited to see the sidechain live at last.