side chains fees are aggregated and paid to mainchain miners as mainchain bitcoin in a single merge mining transaction
Discussion
Makes sense. It sounds like the merge mining revenue comes out of the escrowed funds then.
The degree to which this constitutes “additional” revenue would be a function of how it compares to the mainchain revenue lost in reduced fee pressure, I would imagine.
Very good point. Of course there's some things, like zero knowledge proofs, that are not possible on the mainchain and so any fees earned for those use cases are strictly a win for miners.