The Bitcoin developer famous for exploiting a bug in the Lightning Network, causing it to issue an emergency update in 2022, is working on a new Bitcoin layer 2 aimed at bringing more decentralized finance use cases to Bitcoin.

Bitcoin developer “Burak” — who also created a Lightning Network competitor called Ark Protocol last year — has introduced “Brollups.”

Brollup is a layer 2 that offers a Bitcoin-native rollup design — bundling up transactions without needing to hard fork Bitcoin or issue a non-Bitcoin token, explained Burak.

In the June 21 Medium post, Burak noted that Brollups is still in the “design phase.” He told Cointelegraph that a signet (testnet) rollout could be on the cards for later this year.

Brollups will aim to support more than 90% of use cases in DeFi when it eventually launches, Burak said.

“Whether it’s listing an NFT for sale in exchange for Bitcoin where the buyer pays with Bitcoin upon execution, or placing a token sell order on a decentralized exchange, [all of this is] atomically executed, verifiable, scalable, and enforceable on Bitcoin.”

Brollups are “deeply baked into Bitcoin and work natively with Bitcoin as a payable construct,” Burak added.

Brollups will be managed by “operators,” who will provide liquidity to the protocol and advance the rollup state by chaining Bitcoin transactions at “regular intervals.”

Transactions will be executed on the Bitcoin Virtual Machine.

Burak received considerable praise in the Bitcoin community for developing the solution without needing to hard fork Bitcoin or create a new token.

From hacking the Lightning Network to building a scaling competitor

In October 2022, Burak managed to exploit the Lightning Network with a 998-of-999 multi-signature Taproot transaction.

It triggered an emergency update to Lightning Network node operators after Burak’s efforts caused all nodes to temporarily fall out of sync.

Related: Bitcoin needs DeFi, consumer apps for mass adoption — L2 devs

No funds were stolen in the transaction — which cost a mere $5 transaction fee — but it highlighted an unintended consequence of the Taproot upgrade, industry pundits said at the time.

Very few transactions utlized the Taproot upgrade until in January 2023 when Casey Rodarmor launched the Ordinals protocol.

Taproot transactions comprised a record 46.4% of all Bitcoin transactions in December, 2023, but that has since fallen to 30% this month, a Dune Analytics dashboard from Data Always shows.

Drivechain and the Spiderchain are among the other Bitcoin scaling projects focused on bringing DeFi functionality to Bitcoin.

In May 2022, Burak launched Ark — a Bitcoin layer 2 solution focused primarily on payments by negating the need for payment channels.

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