Thanks Jacky! I was hoping there was going to be a transcript of this. Here’s the english translated version.
Q1: What is the BTCKB program?
Jan: “BTCKB” is a portmanteau of “BTC+CKB”.
The BTCKB program has been in the works for a long time. Last year, we observed the rapid growth of the Bitcoin ecosystem, and we’re very optimistic about how it will evolve over the next year or two and beyond, and we believe it will evolve into a much larger, but very different, marketplace than the ethereum ecosystem. Against this backdrop, we have planned and developed the BTCKB program.
The BTCKB program is a big project that includes product, market, and eco-development, supported by an eco-fund and mainly driven by CELL Studio. Of course, the Secret Monkey team that I lead will also fully support this program. The purpose of the BTCKB program is that we hope to seize this very good opportunity to lead the Bitcoin Renaissance, and to realize the rapid development of the CKB ecosystem through such an opportunity. We believe that features such as “PoW+UTXO” allow CKB to have a very good position in the ecosystem, and there are some features that only CKB has. We believe that the CKB ecosystem can perfectly integrate with the BTC ecosystem and become an integral part of the BTC ecosystem. We can provide more scenarios and functions for BTC.
Therefore, we have made a lot of preparations for this program, and the news of the last few days is just the beginning, and there will be a series of products and activities in the future.
In addition, this program has also received full support from many community partners and partners, which makes up for our team’s shortcomings in marketing and ecological planning, so I’m very confident in the BTCKB program.
Terry: I’d like to add that several of us are programmers by background, so our skills are relatively homogeneous, which is a very big drawback for us. But this time, we have very strong junior partners joining us to make up for our shortcomings, so that the BTCKB program won’t be so completely “tech-first”, but will have a very three-dimensional set of playing styles. That’s why I’m so excited to fly to Singapore overnight and work with my buddies to move this forward.
Cipher: I think this point in time is a very big opportunity for CKB, the timing is right. Timing means that 2024 is considered to be a bull market for Bitcoin, and the narrative is centered back on Bitcoin, with UTXO, PoW, off-chain computing, on-chain validation, and other things that CKB has insisted on for a long time being re-emphasized by everyone. The geographical advantage, not only is a lot of talent concentrated in Singapore, making it easy for us to find collaborators, but also the whole narrative focus has shifted from Europe and the United States to Asia, and Bitcoin Inscription is now centered on Asia and Chinese. People and, as Jan and Terry mentioned earlier, there are a lot of very good partners to help us and make up for our shortcomings.
So there’s a right place, right time, right people, CKB has been dormant for a couple of years, and now we’ve got a really good opportunity, and we’re going to capitalize on it.
Terry: Let me add one more thing. In the past, we had a big problem, that is, the idea was very advanced, and the product and technology behind it could not keep up. For example, we said very early that sharding (sharding technology) does not work, we have to go to the Layer 2 road, which was said very early, but the later products did not keep up. For example, we have always emphasized that UTXO is very good, but people didn’t realize it until now when we started to participate in the inscription, and then we found various wonderful uses of UTXO.
But this time around, our entire product line has been able to keep up with what we’ve come out and said, and that’s the biggest difference from before, and that’s what excites me.
Q2: Why BTC Layer 2 for Nervos and what is the biggest point?
Jan: I think it’s twofold. For CKB, this is the best opportunity for CKB at this time. I’ve been visiting a lot of partners lately, and I’ve found that there is a misunderstanding that Nervos is an ethereum ecosystem project, which may be related to my personal experience and previous media campaigns, but in fact Nervos has been a continuation of Bitcoin’s ideology from the very beginning. But that’s okay, the time has changed, and the advent of Bitcoin inscriptions was a very big turnaround.
The advent of Ordinals changed the perception of the Bitcoin community. Before that, Bitcoin Maximalism was the mainstream, and everyone only recognized BTC, everything else was shit coin, and as long as you had BTC, you could do nothing else. This kind of thinking made BTC very passive, and also largely curbed the development of the BTC ecosystem, because no matter what you do, you will be regarded as a heretic. Until the emergence of Ordinals, and then incubated from the token standard BRC-20, as well as now a variety of new asset standards, asset protocols, so that people’s minds are liberated to slowly accept these things, and this change in thinking has brought about the development of the ecosystem, so that BTC from a passive asset to an active asset, can be used in a variety of places. I think the BTC ecosystem is currently in the first stage of development, and there will be a second, third and fourth stage later, and the ecosystem will keep iterating forward.
Therefore, inscription is a very big turnaround, so that the whole BTC ecosystem is different. In the past, we said PoW was good, and we debated with others when Ether was converted to PoS, but people always thought we were using obsolete technology, that we were outdated, and that PoW was going to die, and that there was no hope. But today, when we say PoW is good, people start to understand and agree with us, and more people support PoW. UTXO is also good, we used to emphasize that UTXO is good, and hope to persuade developers to come to develop on it, but they said that it’s too difficult to do things on it, and the threshold is too high, so they don’t want to come. We used to say that the Lightning Network is great, that it’s the future of Layer 2, that it can’t be replaced by Rollup, but they would say that Vitalik said Rollup is the end game, and that the Lightning Network or the State Channel EtherChannel have already been tried and tested and they don’t work. But now everything has shifted, without us having to repeat ourselves, people are starting to realize the benefits of things like PoW, UTXO, Lightning Network, etc., and realize that we can do a lot of things on BTC, on UTXO. It’s a very big shift.
Before Inscription came along, CKB was seen as a “traitor” to the Ether community, an “outlier” in the Bitcoin community, because all of CKB’s designs were the opposite of Ether, and in the eyes of Bitcoin Maximalism, only BTC was In the eyes of Bitcoin Maximalism, only BTC is orthodox, and no other Altcoin is needed.As a result, CKB is in a very awkward position. But after Inscription, Bitcoin finally had a renaissance, and people were able to accept that there should be something else in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and started to look at what they could do with PoW and UTXO. It’s a very rare opportunity.
The whole industry has gone from Bitcoin to BitShares to Ethereum, and now it’s circling back to Bitcoin, back to the beginning. Not only is it back to the beginning, but it’s willing to do things and explore, which is a huge change. Because of this change, we can now fill in the gaps in our team configuration, and people are willing to join the Bitcoin ecosystem and join this new technological path or this new ecological path/ideological path. It’s a great opportunity for CKB and a great place to stand in it.
Bitcoin is not only a chain, but also a currency, an underlying asset, how to be able to get the most liquidity, the most scenarios is the most important. If we compare the blockchain to a country, then Bitcoin is M0, Layer 2, Layer 3 can create M1, M2, and so on based on M0. There are various types of Layer 2s in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and CKB is probably the most secure, censorship-resistant, and decentralized of all these Layer 2 projects. At the same time, we can build a lot of things on top of CKB, such as connecting CKB to BTC through the Lightning Network, Open Transaction, etc. CKB can provide more valuable scenarios for BTC, and lead the BTC ecosystem in exploring these new technological directions. If the exploration of these new technology directions proves to be valuable, we can also find ways to bring them back to BTC.
In short, this is the best opportunity for CKB and we can provide a lot of value to BTC.
Q3: What kind of role will CELL Studio play?
Cipher: CELL Studio is a bit of an eco-aggregator, linking together eco-projects, and the BTCKB initiative is about connecting BTC and CKB to do something within the PoW+UTXO narrative. Inevitably, there are interdependent parts to this, for example, if you’re doing a Bitcoin DEX, you might need a bridge or a Lightning Network channel to get assets across to CKB. These things may be interdependent or they may be parallel, and they all need to be driven by someone.
CELL Studio hopes to bring in more external support with the backing of the EcoFund to bring all the pieces of the ecosystem together. Because people used to criticize CKB for being too slow, the idea is very advanced, but the product comes out too slowly, CELL Studio hopes to make use of the time, place, and people to do a little bit more, and do things a little bit faster.
Let me be more specific. We have been promoting JoyID wallet, which has a friendly user experience and a very advanced design concept. JoyID supports CKB, EVM, and later on BTC, we hope that ordinary users can play these different ecosystems with just one JoyID wallet, instead of having to change wallets for different ecosystems. We also hope that ordinary users can use CELL Studio’s products for all kinds of application scenarios, including cross-chain, DEX trading, pledge interest generation, offline consumption, and even the use of the Lightning Network.
In addition, CELL Studio will also participate in the investment and incubation of the best projects in the community, as well as reach in-depth cooperation with various projects in the ecosystem.
The announcement of the BTCKB program a few days ago is just the first step, as we move forward, we will do more things, integrate more resources, and act as a practicing party for the research and application of the underlying protocols of Secret Ape Technology.
The application layer of Lightning Network mentioned earlier will also be taken up by us, and we are also designing the DA layer and checking layer of RGB. We are also designing the DA layer and checking layer of RGB. We can also tell you about DEX, which will support Fungible Token, Non-Fungible Token, and Semi-Fungible Token, and we are designing the AMM-like product, but it is not the price curve mode of ethereum, it is the mode of transaction lattice.
All in all, it’s the right time and the right place. We hope you will continue to support and look forward to CELL Studio’s subsequent products and its contribution to the ecosystem. If you have any good suggestions, you can also go to Nervos Talk or Discord to communicate with us.
Terry: Many people may wonder why there is a CELL Studio company behind the BTCKB program, so let me briefly explain.
In the past, the Nervos Foundation has developed programs with the hope that there would be a variety of project teams in the ecosystem, and as a result, there would indeed be a number of projects that would come out, but the product experience of these projects was extremely fragmented, and the pace of development of the different projects was different, which made it difficult to coordinate. If a big program involves 3 to 4 teams, it is basically impossible to deliver this program on time. This time, we are making an improvement by creating a CELL Studio company behind the BTCKB program. We want this company to be strategically driven, incubating products at a set pace and with a completely unified experience.
Some people might analogize CELL Studio to ConsenSys in the ethereum ecosystem, and while this analogy does facilitate understanding, it’s not as accurate. First of all, CELL Studio will specialize in one vertical field, i.e., to penetrate the BTC and CKB ecosystems, rather than to penetrate other fields. Secondly, ConsenSys can actually be divided into two parts: one part is for user products, and the other part is for very basic tools and infrastructure for developers; CELL Studio will focus more on user products, while Secret Ape and Magickbase in our ecosystem will focus more on protocol layer stuff and tools and infrastructure for developers. CELL Studio will focus more on the user side of the product.
CELL Studio will not only make user products, but also incubate them in the community. No matter what the incubated products look like, they will be integrated into CELL Studio’s system and bring the same experience, which is a more important goal. In addition, CELL Studio will also have its own business model.
Q4: What are some of the moves or good news that CKB will be looking forward to this year?
Terry: First of all, the BTCKB program is definitely a top priority this year. We’ve incubated companies like CELL Studio and have strong partners joining us, which is a great start. This year, we’re going to do everything we can around the BTCKB program to support and win the Bitcoin L2 war.
Secondly, as you may have noticed, MingWen is relatively hot in the Chinese community, but in the eyes of Bitcoin fundamentalists, MingWen is still a heresy. We’ve visited a lot of investment organizations and partners and found that a lot of them are influenced by Bitcoin fundamentalism and are still watching and waiting. We see the future of inscriptions, and we have the technology to make it happen and do it better, so we’re going to communicate more so that these organizations can also have confidence in the inscriptions market and the future of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
In early March of this year, we’re going to be organizing a Bitcoin Singapore conference where we’re going to be inviting some of the more influential people in the bitcoin ecosystem, and it’s going to be supported by BTC Study. By organizing this event with BTC Study in Asia, we’ll be able to spread our message and find more partners.
In April of this year, we’re also going to be hosting a special bitcoin event in Hong Kong with Wanxiang, which will be hosted by HashKey and Bitcoin Magazine, in addition to us. This is also a very good opportunity.
Although the inscription is regarded by many people as an “alien”, but we believe that the imagination of this is very large, what we want to do this year is to spread our ideas, there will be a lot of action in the product, Marketing end. It is worth mentioning that our products will be followed one after another this year, and our concept of synchronization.
After the Chinese market is done, our plan is to go to the North American market, and it will be slower there, because I basically didn’t hear a lot of voices about Inscription in North America. Also, after our product is done, we are going to launch it next year.
The above is just a rough summary, and more detailed plans will be made public through various channels in the future.
Q5: In what ways can community members participate in the BTCKB program?
Terry: Let me take developers as an example. If you want to do some development work or make products inside the BTCKB program, there are several channels.
The first one is unorganized, where you just get on and do it. Of course, most people probably don’t choose that way, but we’ve found that there are teams that do. If you need community support and publicity, CKB Community Fund DAO is a good choice, not only can you raise a small amount of money, but you can also publicize your idea in the community.CELL Studio will also consider how to integrate your product into its system.
Second, CELL Studio will publish a roadmap in the future, in the whole product matrix, if there is something you particularly want to do, and have the ability to do it, you can directly contact Cipher, and CELL Studio to cooperate.
Thirdly, if you are not in the framework of CELL Studio’s plan, but what you want to do still belongs to the BTC and CKB ecosystem, you can directly approach the Nervos Foundation or InNervation. although the Nervos Foundation is now pushing for a company to do these things, it doesn’t mean that you can’t go and do something else.
We also have an ambassador program. We will also have an ambassador program for people who don’t have development skills but understand what we’re trying to do and are willing to export our ideas. This is still in the planning stage, and the detailed plan will be announced in the future. This is a very good way for non-developers to participate in the BTCKB program.
For miners or other teams in the ecosystem, we will personally visit and communicate with them.
Sharing by Whitefish
Whitefish: I’m one of the founders of SeeDAO, and I’m very happy to join the CELL Studio fleet; SeeDAO is also one of the projects invested by Nervos.
SeeDAO is also one of the projects invested by Nervos. I’ve been a fan of the CKB project since the fundraising roadshow. I’ve been a fan of the CKB project since the funding roadshow, but the timing of CKB was not so good, as it was called a “heretic” of bitcoin and a “traitor” of ethereum, which didn’t sit well with both sides. But now it’s the right time and the right place, and it’s a great opportunity.
CKB’s technical concepts are very ahead of their time, and the technical team is all very solid, and has done a lot of really awesome things that just aren’t known by many in the marketplace and aren’t explained enough. This time in the Bitcoin Layer 2 battle, I observed all the contestants, most of them are EVM system, or take Cosmos/Polkadot things to change, and then add a cross-chain bridge, then packaged as Layer 2. But CKB insists on the layered architecture from the very beginning, and insists on PoW + UTXO from the very beginning, which is, in my opinion, a very big advantage.
In addition, I have a knot in my heart: SeeDAO is the most successful DAO in the Chinese community, and it is also one of the few organizations in the Chinese community that has the right to tell stories. However, I found that the crypto industry is still in this circle and that circle, and there are VC capital organizations in it. Although SeeDAO has done a good job and made a lot of original works, I feel that it is still very difficult to send out tokens and do some other things.
There are a lot of serious builders, or very “halal” builders, and there are a lot of capitalists, and there are a lot of very capable people, but I think we lack a field of our own. This Bitcoin Layer 2 battle, I think it’s not only an opportunity for CKB, it’s also an opportunity for Chinese people, it’s an opportunity for Chinese people in the digital world.
Ether’s Layer 2 has finished taking its place, but Bitcoin’s side hasn’t yet, plus Satoshi Nakamoto’s disappearance, whoever wins the Bitcoin Layer 2 battle is the real “Layer 1”. Bitcoin’s market capitalization is about 2.5 times that of Ether, and Bitcoin’s ecosystem will definitely be much bigger than Ether’s in the future, and the public chain that wins the Bitcoin Layer 2 battle will have a huge imagination.CKB’s concept is ahead of its time, and its technology is solid, so I really hope that CKB will win from the perspective of its values and its heart.
Recently, I have seen many people in several groups of Nervos are very FUD, so I suggest that we must do an AMA, put down a lot of historical baggage. Solana fell so much at the beginning, but now it is also up, and CKB is only the first four years have been doing the underlying protocols, the upper application is not enough, but in spite of this, it still gave birth to the .bit, JoyID, such as the bullish application. bit, JoyID, and so on. Now that people are willing to join in and do things together, I think we still have a lot of hope.
Tim, Founder of D.id
Tim: As a team that has been supporting CKB’s concept and technology path with practical actions in the past few years, we will also firmly support the BTCKB program this time.
I’ll share some of the features of CKB that I’m particularly excited about. Personally, I like UTXO and PoW. .bit chose to develop on CKB because of its support for various cryptographic algorithms, and now we see products like JoyID.
The difference between developing on CKB and developing on other chains is that the former can be used by users without any knowledge of the blockchain. You don’t need to know the blockchain address, gas fee and so on to use .bit, you can experience the .bit application completely, which can only be done on CKB, and it’s hard to do it on other chains. the unique features of CKB can make the developed application experience better.
From a developer’s point of view, developing on CKB is not the same as developing on EVM, it’s difficult, but it’s not a big problem, so don’t panic, Cipher’s team, our team, Zhixian’s team, etc. have accumulated a lot of experience, and in fact, they all can find a solution.
Some people say that there is no ecosystem in CKB, but in fact we and some other developers have always been there, it’s just that some of the products we make are often aimed at users outside the circle. I’ve seen a big shift in the BTCKB program, and I’m very confident about it.
Let’s move on and share my thoughts on the future. After Inscription caught fire, people started to refocus on the bitcoin ecosystem, so what does it mean to be a bitcoin ecosystem? Or one of the most essential questions, what does it mean to be an inscription? Is it something that can be traded in the Inscription Marketplace called an inscription, or is it something that is completely on-chain and indexed off-chain, or is it something that is called an inscription in terms of ordinal theory plus Indexer, or is it something that is completely on Bitcoin, and it is only called an inscription if the data is traded in terms of the Ordinals and the Indexer that defines it? That’s a question that’s worth discussing. I tend to think that over time.
If you look at the Ordinals protocol, you’ll see that it contains two things, one is called an inscription and the other is called ordinal theory plus Indexer, which essentially solves the problem of transacting in inscriptions, which is defining what it means to say I’ve transferred an inscription to you. But this solution has its own problems. First of all, the transaction friction is very large, and everything has to be on the Bitcoin chain. Secondly, it generates a lot of UTXOs, which also leads to congestion across the network, which is a big turnoff for the halalists.
I think the way forward is that Bitcoin is going to have a smart contract layer, which I would personally call the Contract Kernel, and I’ve previously suggested that another interpretation of CKB is the Contract Kernel of Bitcoin, which happens to be the acronym CKB. The Contract Kernel is a much broader concept, probably even broader than Layer 2. Contract Kernel is a broader concept, probably broader than Layer 2. I think in the future, assets will be issued on Bitcoin, but they will be traded on CKB or some other Layer 2. Since CKB itself is UTXO+PoW, which is more in line with Bitcoin’s thinking, I think CKB has a great opportunity here, and I trust our technical judgment.
Q&A
Q1：Do you have a roadmap for the BTCKB program?
Cipher: We are still working on the roadmap and will send it out later.
Q2: What is the main role of CKB in BTCKB program?
Cipher: Jan mentioned this in her previous answer, CKB is going to be Bitcoin’s Layer 2, which is different from ethereum’s Layer 2, which is mainly a rollup, which is an expansion without sacrificing security as much as possible. What Bitcoin Layer 2 is going to do is not necessarily the same, because Bitcoin Layer 1 is not Turing-complete, there are a lot of things that can’t be done, and CKB is just the right place to make Bitcoin’s functionality enhanced, which includes, but isn’t limited to, new asset types, DEX for different assets, Farming, privacy transactions, etc.
Q3: Will BTCKB have any community support in the future?
Cipher: We have partners who have done very well in Marketing joining us to promote the BTCKB program. With the right timing and the right people, I believe CKB will be able to achieve great results in 2024.
P.S. Link to “BTCKB” telegram group: Telegram: Join Group Chat
Q4: What will be done to attract developers from the Bitcoin community?
Terry: We’ve also gotten to know a lot of developers in the Bitcoin community over the past few years, building up a pool of developers with UTXO backgrounds, and we’ll be combing through those to attract them to come and build the ecosystem with us.
Also, I’ve found that some of the developers in the ethereum ecosystem are getting interested in UTXO, but their mindset is still the Account model. So we have to do a good job of educating them, and hopefully they will be attracted to us.
At the end of the year, we will also go to Europe and the United States, and we actually have some developers there.
