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Syscoin in a Nutshell

Mission#

An open source community dedicated to scaling Bitcoin, especially its proof-of-work security, to meet global needs and emerging use-cases, while sticking as close as possible to Bitcoin's original ideals.

Syscoin's evolution across ten years of mainnet and the foresight reflected in its design mean the project has a head-start providing a comprehensive network and protocol for projects aiming to achieve Bitcoin L2. Join us!

The Blockchain Protocol#

Syscoin is a mainnet Bitcoin L2 that provides a data availability protocol that scales, making EVM and AltVM rollups on Bitcoin a reality. Merge-mined by a majority Bitcoin's hashrate, Syscoin anchors rollups to Bitcoin's own proof-of-work and works with rollups’ existing sequencer architectures.

One such rollup is Rollux, an EVM-equivalent OPStack with 2 second blocktimes and negligible fees, which is live.

Decentralized Finality without Slashing#

Data Availability and scaling it require preventing risks of impact from chain re-orgs. Syscoin solves this with a finality mechanism of multi-quorum chainlocks. This creates an additive security layer on top of Bitcoin's PoW. Served by 1,600 randomly selected Sentry nodes, this practically eliminates the risks of re-orgs, 51% attacks and selfish mining, without involving slashing. This design means the network is always supported by Nakamoto consensus from beneath, and the absence of finality (for any reason) means a graceful degradation instead of a halt that would be seen on a PoS network.

Current Research & Development#

  • zkDA, an upcoming solution that will make Data Availability cross-chain interoperable through ZK light clients. This will make it easy for other blockchains to tap into Syscoin's DA and ultimately Bitcoin's PoW, and to trustlessly interoperate with other ecosystems that do the same.
  • SYS Labs and Syscoin Foundation R&D includes Bitcoin L0, crypto-economic security for every facet of Bitcoin L2 through Rollux, and a difficulty-based stBTC.

Why $SYS?#

Don't blow your finite BTC on gas fees! $SYS is a utility-focused native coin, based upon EIP-1559. SYS incentivizes Bitcoin miners to keep supporting Bitcoin indefinitely into the future despite diminishing BTC rewards. It also incentivizes Syscoin's Sentry nodes.

Diagram#

Objects colored gray are in research and development. All others are mainnet.

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