Judging by price and volume data, Inscription is regaining value. It seems that the craze for launching new assets through Inscription has finally cooled down, and people are starting to ask a new question: besides asset issuance, what else can actually be built?

Concentrated trading and speculation are clearly not enough. Capital made a choice: L2, an ecological direction that can support greater liquidity and higher valuations. BTC How popular is L2 now? If we include projects that have not yet been publicly announced, there are already hundreds in development. Still, we need to be cautious: currently, only a handful of L2s actually inherit the security of the Bitcoin mainnet.

This is especially true for chain-based L2. Whether it's the security of multi-signature bridges, data availability (DA), or even the security of "escape hatches" in extreme cases, There are still no ideal answers. Multi-signature bridges are a particularly important issue. Most L2 bridges currently on the market rely on trust assumptions, That is, the bridge's multiple controllers cannot collude or behave maliciously.

When discussing BTC L2, we are actually deeply influenced by the concept of Ethereum L2 - some people even regard L2 as the same thing as Rollup. Many security standards are also directly borrowed from Ethereum's top-level definitions. However, whether Bitcoin scaling actually needs to follow Ethereum's account model and smart contract support path remains an open question.

If we look back at scaling solutions that have been tested for many years – despite often being criticized for being slow – and currently have the highest TVL among Bitcoin scaling solutions, that is Lightning Network, we may find more useful inspiration. It is worth emphasizing that in the Bitcoin community's understanding of scaling, the Lightning Network is also a form of L2. It just gives up a lot of scalability in the blockchain scaling trilemma, including smart contract functionality that many people want.

Of course, there are already many efforts to combine the Lightning Network with smart contracts, e.g. RGB protocol.

After years of development, the Lightning Network has formed its own security framework:

Channel establishment mechanism:
Users create a two-party multi-signature address on the Bitcoin blockchain, which requires the signatures of two private keys to authorize transactions. In this way, a private payment channel can be established between two participants.

Security basics:
The payment channel relies on Bitcoin's scripting language and transaction verification rules to ensure that funds can only be transferred by mutual consent. in other words, Any transaction made through a payment channel inherits the cryptographic guarantees and verification security of Bitcoin mainnet.

Conditional payment implementation:
HTLC enables conditional payments by requiring the recipient to provide the correct preimage within a specified time to claim the payment.

Security guarantee:
HTLC combines cryptographic hash functions with time locks to ensure payments can be routed securely between nodes while preventing any participant from fraudulently withholding or stealing funds. These contracts are ultimately executed on the Bitcoin blockchain, which means they inherit the security and immutability of its underlying layer.

Decentralized routing:
The Lightning Network uses a decentralized routing model to discover paths between payers and recipients. Although the routing process itself occurs off-chain, final resolution and any necessary dispute resolution are ultimately handled on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Security and Privacy:
The Lightning Network protects the privacy of the payment path by using private routing and onion routing, preventing intermediate nodes from seeing the entire payment process, thereby improving network security and user privacy.

Automatic monitoring:
Users can monitor their channels themselves or rely on monitoring services to ensure that their counterparties do not attempt to broadcast stale state to the blockchain.

Punishment mechanism:
If one party attempts to cheat by submitting an old channel state, the other party can respond with a proof of the latest valid state and claim the cheater's funds as a penalty. This creates a strong incentive to follow the rules, Because dishonest behavior directly results in economic losses. Essentially, the game is played off-chain, while fraud proof and penalties are performed on-chain.

Ultimately, capital votes with money. Judging from the current TVL, the native Bitcoin community still mainly stays on the "orthodox" Lightning Network, focusing on micropayment use cases. However, the total network value exceeds$850 billion Bitcoin Capital is still not fully activated. Bringing this capital into a broader, richer ecosystem depends on being able to deliver a compelling security model—ideally, one with native security.

The large number of idle BTC addresses is bound to attract many projects to compete for it, and some projects are even trying to redefine the meaning of security. In the domestic market, We can already see major industry figures openly debating the authenticity of certain technologies, such as whether the so-called zk rollups for Bitcoin L2 are real or are just marketing hype.

overseas, OP_CAT The movement is gaining momentum in an attempt to push Bitcoin's verification capabilities "one step further. " In the coming months, we may be witnessing a "war of hundreds of L2s. " As the project moves from testnet to mainnet, the security of these new L2s will be tested by real users and hackers.

At the same time, people also strongly expect Lightning Labs in Taproot Assets With the support of the Internet, can it bring more diversified ecological use cases to the Lightning Network, which has long been under the banner of "legitimacy" and "security".

UKey Has full application support. We look forward to working with everyone to build the BTC ecosystem.