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Ethereum’s major oracle provider, Chainlink, is making moves in the growing ecosystem of BTCFi (Bitcoin Finance).
Botanix Labs, the team behind the EVM-compatible Bitcoin L2 Spiderchain, is integrating Chainlink’s data feeds to allow inter-blockchain communication to the world of EVM.
As part of the partnership, Botanix is participating in Chainlink Scale, a gas grant program that Chainlink offers to onboarded blockchains to initially cover the operating costs of their oracle networks.
Spiderchain is also integrating Chainlink’s cross-chain interoperability protocol (CCIP), which serves to enable programmable token/data transfers across different blockchains.
Johann Eid, chief business officer at Chainlink Labs, said “Botanix is the first Bitcoin layer-2 to join Scale, a significant step in helping its developers to build secure, scalable and fully-featured dapps on Bitcoin.”Â
Like other players in the BTCFi space, Spiderchain strives to unlock the use of BTC natively on the thousands of EVM-compatible dapps today.
Spiderchain explicitly eschews Bitcoin’s non-fungible UTXO (unspent transaction output) model while embracing Ethereum’s nimbler “account model.”
It’s a slow redefinition of what Bitcoin is traditionally known for. Bitcoin’s dominant narrative is being a digital gold-like “reserve” asset due to the blockchain’s lack of smart contract compatibility.
Spiderchain derives its name from its chain’s design. According to Botanix’s docs, the chain is a permissionless set of “distributed network of multisigs, safeguarded by a randomized subset of participants,” known as orchestrators.
Orchestrators deposit BTC into the multisig wallets as a kind of escrow bond to participate in consensus, and run a Bitcoin and Spiderchain node simultaneously.
A decentralized sequencer will be used from day one of Spiderchain’s launch. By leveraging Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade, Spiderchain is also able to accommodate a larger network of multisigs on the Bitcoin parent chain as is, without requiring any soft forks.
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