Overview
Last updated
Last updated
Note: Thanks to your contributions, cycle I of our TestNet Phase 3 journey has officially wrapped up! Now we're one step closer to onboarding the world to Bitcoin. Stay tuned for the next steps!
Nubit DA 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.
Nubit DA involves three essential components:
Validators: These nodes operate using a consensus algorithm rooted in NubitBFT and are tasked with proposing blocks, and verifying the integrity of blocks and transactions. Nubit is proposing a new consensus mechanism designed to support an exceptionally large validator set (potentially of size 200,000), to facilitate consensus within the chain.
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.
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 to deploy 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.
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, and data availability, each empowered by Bitcoin:
Consensus mechanism: Nubit aims to fully inherit Bitcoin security, including economic security, temper resistance, and censorship resistance. It achieves this through the implementation of Bitcoin’s native staking and Bitcoin anchoring methods. Further, Nubit explores an efficient CometBFT-based consensus powered by SNARK for signature aggregation, named NubitBFT, bringing an unprecedented decentralized validator network.
Data availability: Nubit enables light clients to be part of its consensus protocol, so 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.
Developed using the Cosmos SDK, Nubit DA will support BTC staking through solutions like Babylon. This allows for BTC staking on the Nubit DA, ensuring its economic security.
Since Nubit DA is built on Cosmos SDK, for detailed RPC methods to interact with Nubit Validators, please visit the Validator APIs.
To participate in Nubit DA by running a data availability node, individuals can operate either a full node or a light node. Nubit utilizes a data availability mechanism that combines KZG commitments with two-dimensional Reed-Solomon erasure codes. This framework ensures the correctness of RS encoding through validity proofs based on KZG commitments, rather than using traditional fraud proofs. Consequently, light nodes can retrieve necessary data through KZG opening proofs instead of Merkle proofs, significantly enhancing retrieval speeds ---- by up to 10X in typical scenarios and up to 100X in more extreme situations.
For further information on interacting with Nubit Nodes and detailed API documentation, please visit Nubit DA Node APIs.
