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The Mintlayer network, a Bitcoin sidechain or Layer 2 (L2), has been officially launched. The network came to life with the extraction of the genesis block on January 29, opening the door to decentralized finance applications (DeFi) linked to Bitcoin. With supporters including advisor Charlie Shrem, Mintlayer has garnered significant interest from day one. Now, the community can try the sidechain for themselves.
The Long-Awaited Mintlayer Network Has Finally Arrived
It took a lot of work to reach the day the genesis block was extracted, but the architects of Mintlayer believe all the effort was worth it. The biggest proof of what Mintlayer can bring to L2 innovation on Bitcoin will be discovered after DeFi applications take shape. For now, the Mintlayer community is happy to have reached the milestone of successfully launching the sidechain.
Mintlayer offers some features that will be familiar to Bitcoin users, such as relying on the UTXO model instead of the account-based system that characterizes most smart contract chains. There are also many different things, like a consensus mechanism that combines PoW and PoS components. Block signers use lightweight hardware that gives everyone an approximately equal chance to predict the next block, instead of high-powered ASICs for block mining.
Atomic Swaps to Be Used Instead of Risky Bridges
One of the biggest challenges in designing a smart contract network is allowing innovation to flourish and tokenization to occur without creating security vulnerabilities. Many networks have suffered severe setbacks due to bridges or wrapped tokens being the targets of major hack attacks, hindering adoption and setting back development for years. Aware of this situation, Mintlayer is designed to use Atomic Swaps instead.
When Atomic Swaps are implemented, they will offer a highly secure way to exchange tokens on Mintlayer, and the emergence of decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and other protocols that take advantage of this feature on the Bitcoin sidechain is expected. For security, Mintlayer also supports non-Turing complete smart contracts. This limits developers to a set of specific functions, reducing the likelihood of hack attacks.
On the other hand, with the extraction of the genesis block, not only did the Mintlayer network go live, but the ML token also took its place in the market. Network participants will be able to stake ML tokens to protect the Mintlayer network. ML tokens will be given to stakers in exchange for producing new blocks, a process that will occur on average every two minutes. Token emission will continue to decrease over a period of 10 years.
The potential use cases for Mintlayer are open to interpretation by third-party developers. In other words, it can theoretically be used in any way to achieve anything. DeFi is the most obvious use case, and new applications launched on Mintlayer are likely to provide fundamentals such as lending, borrowing, trading, and collateralizing stablecoins.
Furthermore, the architects of Mintlayer will also step into RWA tokenization, optimistic that institutions may want to create products to tokenize assets such as real estate, stocks, and art. Lastly, the issuance of NFTs on Mintlayer is expected, which could become one of the foundational uses of the network.
