A two way peg is a second layer transaction system, where new tokens are created when bitcoin is locked up on the base layer, and those bitcoin can only be spend, if those second layer tokens are destroyed.

That's the original vision of Blockstreams early side chain research, and it took 10+ years to finally have a trustless way to get Bitcoin from the side chain to the baselayer.

What enables this magic is succinct zero knowledge proofs which are verified on the base layer in order to unlock the Bitcoin. With BitVM the zk proofs can be emulated on bitcoin today.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Tell me in which country Blockstream is based and I tell You how trustless it is!

So you’re saying it doesn’t rely on a federation like Liquid does?

Exactly.

There is a 1-of-n lifeness assumption in BitVM, so you trust that at least one of the operators will behave according to protocol, but even the operators cannot steal your money.

Where can we use this?

I don't think there's a pretty and usable UI yet...

Can you open that BitVM part a little bit, is it "live" and usable?

There are a couple different implementations, the early versions did work on mainnet, but were very hacky proof of concepts. Early next year there should be a couple major releases though.