Introduction
Nubit is a scalable and the first Bitcoin-native data availability layer.
What is Nubit?
Nubit is a scalable, cost-efficient, data availability layer secured by Bitcoin for the Bitcoin community. Nubit enables the scaling of Bitcoin's data capacities, empowering applications like Ordinals, Layer 2s, and price oracles, thus broadening the scope and efficiency of the Bitcoin ecosystem. For a deeper understanding of the data availability layer, please refer to: Data Availability Layer.
Nubit involves four essential components:
Validators: These nodes operate using a consensus algorithm rooted in Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) and are tasked with proposing blocks, verifying the integrity of blocks and transactions, and facilitating a sub-consensus mechanism essential for the operation of the trustless bridge. Nubit is proposing a new consensus mechanism designed to support an exceptionally large validator set, potentially exceeding 200,000, to facilitate consensus within the chain.
Trustless Bridge: This component acts as an intermediary, collecting storage fees from users and allocating rewards to validators through a payment channel network (PCN). This solution, leveraging the trustless nature and security properties of PCNs, presents a lower risk for users compared to existing bridges.
Full Storage Node: After receiving block data from validators, these nodes are entrusted with the reliable storage of all data. The integrity and availability of stored data are critical, especially given the risks of malicious activities such as data withholding or tampering. To mitigate these risks, Data Availability Sampling (DAS) requests from light clients are employed to verify data availability, ensuring the system’s resilience against such threats.
Light clients: obtain block headers broadcasted by validators, which include data commitments. Based on these commitments, they may randomly initiate requests to full storage nodes to verify data availability.
To thoroughly examine the architecture of Nubit, please refer to Nubit's Architecture.
Why We Need Nubit?
The recent surge in demand for Bitcoin inscriptions has led to over 14GB of data being stored on the Bitcoin blockchain, incurring significantly high costs. This development underscores a critical need within the Bitcoin ecosystem: In a more expansive Bitcoin ecosystem, the inherent data throughput limitations of Bitcoin itself could pose a bottleneck. Consequently, there's a need for deploying a data availability solution that aligns with the fundamental principles of Bitcoin. Addressing this need, Riema Labs has taken the lead by launching Nubit, the first Bitcoin-native data availability layer, guided by the principle of trust minimization.
Why Build with Nubit?
With Nubit, applications, and users in the Bitcoin ecosystem can enjoy a data availability layer solution secured by Bitcoin's proven security. The figure below explores the benefits of Nubit, including security inheritance from Bitcoin, trust minimization, and native alignment with Bitcoin. It presents Nubit's core innovations: consensus mechanism, data availability, and trustless bridge, each empowered by Bitcoin:
Consensus mechanism: Nubit aims to fully inherit the security of Bitcoin, including economic security, temper resistance, and censorship resistance. It achieves this through the implementation of Bitcoin’s native staking and timestamping methods, such as those introduced by Babylon. Further, Nubit explores an efficient PBFT-based consensus powered by SNARK for signature aggregation, bringing an unprecedented decentralized validator network.
Data availability: Nubit enables light clients as part of its consensus protocol, it is crucial to ensure the data integrity held by those light clients. Data Availability Sampling (DAS) is a technique that enables a participant to verify the presence of block data without needing to download the entire block. This is done by conducting multiple rounds of random sampling on small portions of the block data. Each successful sampling round increases the likelihood that the data is fully available. Once a predetermined confidence level is reached, the block data is deemed accessible. Validators, full storage nodes, and light nodes each have specific roles in ensuring data availability through their designated protocols.
Trustless bridge: Nubit utilizes a trustless bridge that leverages the Lightning Network's payment channels. This approach not only aligns with native Bitcoin payment methods but also imposes no additional trust requirements. Users have the option for emergency withdrawal of their funds at any time. The decentralized payee, supported by the consensus of an extensive validator set, maximizes the bridge's liveness and security.
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