The "Fog" and "Lighthouse" of Bitcoin L2: GOAT Network's Path Choices and Industry Baseline

When everyone can claim to be Layer2, a more fundamental question begins to emerge: what does the Bitcoin ecosystem truly need?

Written by: ChandlerZ, Foresight News

Since 2024, in the crypto market, Bitcoin Layer2 has almost become a generalized label. From sidechains to Rollups, from state channels to any system compatible with EVM, numerous projects have declared themselves as Bitcoin L2, vying for narrative dominance in a vacuum of discourse. However, when everyone can claim to be Layer2, a more fundamental question begins to emerge: what does the Bitcoin ecosystem truly need?

The development of Bitcoin L2 does not need more stories, but rather engineering solutions that are verifiable, operational, have clear standards, and sustainable economic models. GOAT Network has gradually established its technical positioning in this context. It did not choose the path of token issuance for hype, nor did it rely on abstract concepts to package technology. Instead, it focused on the engineering implementation of BitVM2, proposing a set of executable and verifiable solutions, complemented by an economic brown paper and industry benchmark standards, attempting to reshape a credible path for Bitcoin L2.

Origin and Motivation: The "Chronic Illness" of BTC L2 and the Choices of the "Breaker"

BTCFi has long hovered between technological ideals and practical bottlenecks. Its fundamental dilemma can be summarized as a classic trilemma: security must align with the consensus mechanism of the Bitcoin mainnet, functionality requires support for scalability and intelligence, but all of this must be built on the premise of not sacrificing the essence of decentralization. More troublesome is that BTC native assets still lack a stable yield path, having long relied on funding rates from centralized platforms or incentives from tokens on other chains, making it difficult to build a sustainable financial ecosystem. These structural flaws have led many Bitcoin L2 projects to end up with pseudo-bridging, centralized custody, or even reliance on Ethereum cross-chain infrastructure, resulting in technical ambiguity and commercial incoherence.

From the outset, GOAT Network chose a vertical strategy, emphasizing implementation first and technical verifiability. In hardware architecture, it abandoned the immature RISC-V and instead adopted the more industrially stable MIPS architecture, combined with a series of circuit optimizations to build Ziren (formerly zkMIPS), establishing an efficient on-chain computing environment. In system design, by combining BitVM2 with a decentralized Sequencer architecture, it built a non-custodial, on-chain verifiable execution path, achieving state traceability and data verifiability for on-chain arbitration mechanisms.

Strategically, GOAT did not pin its fate on a B2B model or joint project launches, but instead built the most authentic zk scenario use cases from the bottom up, with Bitcoin zkVM as the core. While most so-called L2 projects are still spinning their wheels in narrative mud, GOAT has already reforged Bitcoin L2 from a buzzword into a sustainable real-world solution.

The Evolution and Engineering Implementation of BitVM2

The architecture proposed by GOAT BitVM2 marks a key step for Bitcoin scaling technology from theoretical feasibility to engineering practicality. Compared to the early BitVM v1’s logic gate simulation and fraud proof concepts, GOAT’s version achieves a systematic reconstruction in security mechanisms, challenge efficiency, and execution economics, pushing Bitcoin native zkRollup into practical usability for the first time. GOAT BitVM2 shortens the challenge period from the original 14 days to less than 1 day. Its architecture combines zkMIPS zero-knowledge proofs, decentralized sequencers, and multi-round challenge reward mechanisms to build a complete Bitcoin native ZK Rollup solution. Specifically, its core breakthroughs are reflected in three aspects:

• In terms of security, it proposes an L2 validator set commitment mechanism to achieve L2 consensus verification, solving the Operator double-spending attack problem;
• In terms of efficiency, it combines a simplified L2 reimbursement process and a zkMIPS-based real-time proof network to improve Operator reimbursement efficiency;
• In terms of incentives, it proposes a Universal Operator solution, using cryptographic lotteries to achieve random role rotation, building a systematic incentive mechanism to ensure balanced interests among all participants (Sequencer, Operator, and Challenger).

Currently, the GOAT BitVM2 testnet is live, and Ziren has completed demonstrations of off-chain computation and mainnet challenge simulation. In the test environment, the system supports zkRollup execution paths based on BTC native inputs, verifying that L2 execution results can achieve on-chain deterministic arbitration under trustless conditions, laying the engineering foundation for the full deployment of future BTC L2 applications.

Meanwhile, GOAT Network is actively advancing innovative explorations of BitVM3. As a member of the BitVM Alliance, GOAT Network mainly focuses on verifiable obfuscated circuit solutions combining DV-SNARK and NIZK, and has taken the lead in completing prototype implementation and testing. With this breakthrough, the efficiency of on-chain challenges has improved by more than 1000 times, reducing challenge costs to 1/1000 of the original model.

GOAT Network will continue to collaborate with ecosystem partners to promote the engineering and large-scale application of BTC Layer2 technology, accelerating the functional expansion and value release of the Bitcoin network.

Economic Model and the "Revenue Closed Loop"

Among all explorations of Bitcoin financialization, technical architecture is certainly important, but what truly determines whether a Bitcoin L2 project can achieve long-term sustainability is always whether its economic model is self-consistent and closed-loop. GOAT Network’s "Bitcoin zkRollup Economic Brown Paper 2.0" is centered on this core issue. Its intention is not to construct a narrative space of empty incentives, but to systematically establish an incentive structure centered on BTC native security and usage behavior, so that L2 no longer relies on centralized bridging, fake liquidity, or third-party token subsidies, but can create, allocate, and continuously release revenue through real network usage and system participant behavior.

In the first version of the previously released "Economic Brown Paper," based on BTC staking for yield, GOAT further proposed a dual-token model: pBTC represents the locked principal, which users can redeem at any time, ensuring asset sovereignty is not lost; yBTC serves as the system’s native yield certificate, representing the net value return generated by real on-chain economic activity. Whether it is transaction fees, sequencing rights revenue, or challenger rewards, all are distributed in the form of yBTC. This design effectively separates yield from principal, eliminating the need to forcibly attract liquidity with high APY, and instead making yield a natural product of usage, forming a clear and traceable revenue closed loop.

Compared to other L2 solutions that rely on cross-chain bridges or ERC20-wrapped assets, the native yield path constructed by GOAT is more robust from an engineering perspective. Thanks to the combination of BitVM2 and zkVM architecture, BTC can enter the L2 execution environment without custody, and participate in the full transaction and application lifecycle through off-chain execution and on-chain verification mechanisms. Only state commitments and computation result verification logic are published on-chain; the entire process requires no third-party token intermediaries or centralized gateways, truly achieving the architectural goal of not compromising BTC mainnet control and L2 composability.

On top of the operating mechanism, GOAT further proposes the concept of a modular economic layer, which not only supplements the current incentive logic for the three roles, but also pre-deploys cross-protocol resource coordination capabilities for future multi-application parallel ecosystems. As more DeFi, RWA, or payment scenarios are integrated, developers will be allowed to define their own yield distribution mechanisms, build internal liquidity feedback models, and use yBTC as a unified metric, enabling the combination and collaboration of incentive logic across different scenarios. Ultimately, this economic layer will evolve into a collaborative financial base atop Bitcoin L2.

As Kevin Liu, a core contributor to GOAT Network, said, true BTCFi has never begun, and its real beginning must be based on the dual closed loops of native security and native yield.

If the "Economic Brown Paper 2.0" outlines a self-consistent revenue closed loop for GOAT Network, then it is the products and ecosystem matrix around BTCFi that truly bring this logic into reality. The value of Bitcoin native Layer2 should not remain in theory and narrative, but should provide holders with truly usable, sustainable, and non-custodial yield access.

GOAT Network has officially launched a full suite of BTCFi yield products, offering diverse choices for users with different risk preferences. GOAT Safebox, as a zero-risk option, allows users to participate in decentralized sequencer incentives by locking BTC for three months, earning about 2% on-chain yield, especially suitable for institutional investors; BTCB/DOGEB Vault achieves 5% annualized yield through cross-chain bridging and gas fee recycling, targeting conservative users; Sequencer PoS Staking opens a medium-risk path, based on multi-token PoS and decentralized sequencer networks, with staking APY up to 10%; in addition, the Avalon lending market enables flexible lending and liquidity allocation for BTC and BTC LST on Layer2, truly bringing Bitcoin into DeFi-level capital efficiency scenarios.

Today, GOAT Network’s ecosystem has taken shape, covering DeFi, infrastructure tools, cross-chain bridges, NFT, gaming, sequencer nodes, and more, attracting developers, users, institutions, and communities to participate together. As the ecosystem continues to expand, GOAT Network is evolving into a financial operating system with sustainable yield, open collaboration, and diverse innovation.

From "Talk the Talk" to "Industry Baseline"

If technology and economic models are the first stage of GOAT Network’s implementation, then its release of the "Bitcoin Native Layer2 Network Benchmark Proposal" represents its assumption of a higher level of ecosystem responsibility, aiming to define clear boundaries for the chaotic concept of Bitcoin L2. Faced with a market full of projects labeled as L2 but actually relying on federated multisig or external trust mechanisms, GOAT hopes to establish the criteria for native Layer2 networks through a set of principles centered on the spirit of Bitcoin.

This proposal is divided into "core requirements" and "optional enhancements," emphasizing frequent anchoring to the Bitcoin mainnet, on-chain dispute resolution, permissionless forced exits, trust-minimized bridging structures, and system availability under attack or downtime. The standard is technologically neutral, not favoring any particular architecture; as long as these principles are met, it can be considered a Bitcoin native L2.

Unlike most protocols that set their own standards, GOAT treats this as a starting point for industry co-construction, emphasizing the openness and neutrality of the standard. This is not only an extension of its engineering philosophy but also a clarification of the Bitcoin L2 concept in today’s semantically chaotic environment.

GOAT Network has implemented the first real-time proving system running in a production environment, becoming the first Bitcoin zkRollup project to support instant withdrawal initiation and full-link visualized proofs.

GOAT Network states that all peg-out operations have achieved datafication, visualization, and on-chain verifiability, and are presented in real time through a public UI page. The current system is fully open-source, does not rely on trust assumptions, and has built a complete closed loop from BTC deposit, on-chain interaction, to withdrawal. The project team believes this capability will redefine the technical standard for Bitcoin zkRollup and lay the foundation for the practical usability of BTCFi.

After completing technical implementation and establishing industry baselines, GOAT Network has not limited its vision to engineering breakthroughs, but has further shifted its focus to community building. In their view, the vitality of a decentralized network comes not only from the security of the code and the feasibility of the model, but also from whether it can form an open and active community ecosystem.

GOAT has carried out multi-dimensional community initiatives. Through the One Piece program, users can complete social, cross-chain, trading, mini-game, and other interactions at zero or low cost, and exchange points for token airdrops, becoming the main distribution channel for the early ecosystem. Unlike most projects that rely on airdrop speculation, One Piece emphasizes long-term participation and diversified interaction. In August, GOAT Network announced the launch of the GOAT Vanguard Ambassador Program, recruiting Bitcoin pioneers, quality content creators, and like-minded community leaders worldwide to jointly lead the BTCFi narrative and promote the implementation of Bitcoin L2 ecosystem and BTC native yield innovation. In addition, the project has accumulated the purchase of 34 BTC, officially launching it as the Ecosystem Pilot Fund, directly demonstrating the project’s intention to use Bitcoin itself to incentivize the Bitcoin ecosystem. Together, these three form another main channel for GOAT beyond technology, making Bitcoin native Layer2 a social experiment built and benefited by global users.

Establishing Order for the Next Phase of Bitcoin L2

Bitcoin’s scaling path is at a turning point. With its systematic layout in technical implementation, economic model construction, and industry standard setting, GOAT attempts to become the "order establisher" in this field. What is truly native Bitcoin Layer2? How to establish a trustless execution path? How to build a sustainable native BTC yield mechanism?

When the hype fades and buzzwords fall silent, what remains will be those systematic solutions with standards, verifiability, and sustainable operation. What GOAT is building is not just an L2 product suite, but a foundational rule set for the entire Bitcoin scaling ecosystem. Through engineering action, it establishes order and reshapes trust for the next stage of Bitcoin L2.