The Spring of UTXO: New Expectations for the Bitcoin Ecosystem

As we all know, Bitcoin does not have the smart contract capabilities like Ethereum. Compared to Ethereum's ERC20 contracts, handling Bitcoin's UTXO is an unavoidable aspect. Building applications based on UTXO shares security with the main chain, and this model brings many expectations to the market, potentially forming an ecological model different from Ethereum L2.

UTXO is the most distinctive data model of Bitcoin, and therefore the Bitcoin Layer 2 ecosystem is expected to present a form different from that of Ethereum. In recent years, Ethereum L2 has developed rapidly, and its prosperous ecosystem has overall controlled the on-chain fees of the Ethereum chain. In contrast, the development of the Bitcoin network ecosystem is still in its early stages. The on-chain transaction activity brought by the inscriptions of 2023 and this year's runes has laid the foundation for tapping into the potential of UTXO.

The Taproot upgrade further enhances the development potential of the Bitcoin ecosystem. As we know, Taproot is the most important upgrade since Bitcoin activated Segregated Witness, aimed at further improving the network's privacy and efficiency. The most significant change of Taproot is the ability to aggregate multiple complex signatures for verification, rather than verifying them individually. This makes network performance faster, reduces fees, and saves block space. Taproot provides a new way of executing Bitcoin transactions by enhancing privacy and flexibility, which will greatly improve Bitcoin's scalability.

The Cell model of Nervos CKB is similar to a smarter UTXO. It can be understood this way: Bitcoin's UTXO is a box containing a paper ledger, while a Cell upgrades the ledger inside the box to an Excel electronic document. Nervos CKB inherits the architecture of Bitcoin UTXO and creates the Cell Model, which is a universal UTXO state storage model that maintains the simplicity and consistency of UTXO. In CKB, all states are stored in Cells, with computations done off-chain and transaction validation and on-chain operations performed by nodes. Unlike Bitcoin UTXO, Cells can contain various data types, such as CKByte, Token, JavaScript code, or serialized data like JSON strings. This richer data type expands the capabilities of Cells, extending UTXO to enable smart contracts ( and even customized smart contracts, such as issuing NFTs, limiting token supply, and setting usage conditions that meet specific needs ).

Will the uniqueness of UTXO give rise to a different ecological world? The deep exploration of inscriptions and runes in Bitcoin's UTXO makes it possible to deploy assets based on UTXO, while the upgrade of UTXO in Nervos CKB further liberates computing power. These indicate the different application potentials of UTXO, which seem more attractive and become new expectations for the industry. Looking back at the development of Ethereum, from the ERC20 standard spawning ICOs, to the development of AMM powering DeFi, and then the emergence of NFTs and the metaverse, its ecological paradigm has gradually become richer. However, this process has not been smooth sailing, experiencing many twists and turns along the way. Bitcoin's recent innovations initially gained some market heat, which is a good phenomenon, indicating that the market has high expectations and confidence in the potential of UTXO. But the heat comes quickly and goes quickly; after the emergence of runes, the popularity of inscriptions naturally declines. Currently, both inscriptions and runes are still in the stage of competing for "minting." Minting is just the beginning; how to carry out applications and enrich the ecology afterward is the more critical question. The situation of Nervos CKB is similar; the current ecological applications can be said to be a simple "copy" of the Ethereum ecosystem.

Risk Warning: The development of blockchain technology is not meeting expectations; regulatory policies have uncertainties; the implementation of Web3.0 business models is falling short of expectations.