As the Bitcoin ecosystem gradually gains favor from investors, various technical routes related to Bitcoin have also emerged. L2, staking, and DeFi projects that integrate BTC into Ethereum or Solana have all taken the stage, and native DA projects of BTC have also started to attract attention in the market.
Summary:
In the modular battle, can NEAR DA become the ultimate solution?
Background:
Eclipse, a Layer2 solution: How to integrate Ethereum security, Solana high performance, and Celestia DA narrative?
Table of Contents:
What is Nubit?
Nubit architecture
Highlights and features of Nubit
Conclusion
DA (Data Availability) is simply the process of block producers publishing all transaction data of a block to the network, so that validators can download it. If block producers release complete data and make it available for download by validators, we say that the data is available.
The DA layer is an abstraction that has emerged along with the scalability needs of various blockchains and the higher requirements for DA. We have seen a large number of projects emerge in the market, such as Celestia, EigenLayer, NearDA, Avail, etc. These projects often have their own unique features and strive to establish their own reputation. The DA in the Bitcoin ecosystem has also begun to attract market attention.
Recently, Nubit completed a $3 million Pre-Seed financing round, with participation from dao5, OKX Ventures, Primitive Ventures, and others. The team stated that they are preparing for the launch of the mainnet.
Nubit is a scalable extension of the Bitcoin native DA layer, with security protected by Bitcoin. Nubit is able to effectively expand the data capacity of the Bitcoin network, providing support for applications such as Ordinals, L2, and oracles, thereby expanding the scope and efficiency of the Bitcoin ecosystem. It aims to fully inherit the security of Bitcoin, including economic security, anti-tampering, and anti-censorship.
During the hot market conditions in the cryptocurrency market, the fees for Bitcoin transfers or transactions are often very high, and congestion issues can arise. The increased market demand last year led to the storage of over 14GB of data on Bitcoin, resulting in high costs. According to data from its official website, Nubit is able to reduce transaction costs by over 95% and increase data throughput by over 100 times.
Nubit primarily consists of four basic components: validators, trustless bridges, full storage nodes, and light clients.
Among them, validator nodes primarily use the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm, with the main task of proposing, validating, and ensuring the integrity of transactions. The minimal trust bridge acts as an intermediary, charging users storage fees and distributing rewards to validators through payment channels. Full storage nodes mainly receive block data from validators and are responsible for reliable storage of all the data. Light clients obtain blocks broadcasted by validators, including data commitments, and may randomly request verification from full storage nodes to validate the DA.
In terms of consensus mechanism, Nubit still adheres to the semi-synchronous network assumption. It introduces a consensus algorithm called NuBFT, which is a variant of the BFT consensus algorithm that combines the process of slotting data partitions based on Reed-Solomon encoding and the generation of KZG. Even if some data nodes are damaged, the original data can be recovered using Reed-Solomon encoding.
Additionally, the KZG submitted to Bitcoin ensures the validity of the original data. By integrating block partitioning using Reed-Solomon encoding and KZG generation into the consensus algorithm, the integrity, availability, and scalability of stored data are directly linked to the consensus process, significantly enhancing the “robustness” of the entire DA system.
It is worth noting that Nubit uses BTC as the main token for its consensus protocol and inherits the economic security of Bitcoin through mechanisms such as Babylon’s Bitcoin native staking. In contrast, general DA layers like Celestia use their own network tokens, introducing additional trust assumptions outside of Bitcoin.
In terms of data availability, Nubit adopts a hybrid approach to address potential network interruptions caused by node data encoding errors. It integrates full nodes and light nodes to ensure data integrity. First, Nubit uses KZG as a proof of validity to ensure DA, reducing memory, bandwidth, and storage requirements while maintaining simplicity. Even in the event of a complete collapse of the Nubit network, nodes can still recover data using full nodes and KZG commitments submitted to Bitcoin. To further enhance network scalability, Nubit adopts lightweight nodes equipped with Data Availability Sampling (DAS). This addition allows for larger block sizes to meet the growing demand for data availability.
However, unlike other Bitcoin L2 solutions, Nubit does not have a smart contract execution layer.
In terms of trustless cross-chain bridges, previous Bitcoin L2 solutions often relied on centralized bridges, which could potentially introduce security vulnerabilities due to the specific architecture of Bitcoin. Nubit, on the other hand, directly chooses the Lightning Network, enabling Nubit to establish a secure and trustless bridge within the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Nubit settles network fees using Bitcoin payment channels, which is a key distinction from other BTC bridge solutions. Nubit users do not need to meet the requirement of making a deposit. Instead, they directly process transaction fees within the state channels of each transaction, ensuring the security of user funds is directly related to the security of Bitcoin itself. Additionally, Nubit’s design allows for emergency withdrawals, allowing users to recover their funds by closing Bitcoin payment channels even if Nubit ceases operation.
In the past, in the practical implementation of BTC technologies, to some extent, enhancements to Bitcoin DA such as SegWit and Taproot have been made. However, the emergence of Nubit seems to come at the right time, as the modularization and L2 wave had not yet emerged at that time, and a completely new solution is now at hand. After Nubit’s collaboration with projects such as Babylon, Merlin, and BounceBit, it is expected to officially launch its mainnet later this year. Its future development is worth paying attention to.