On June 16, 2025, Eastern Time, GOAT Network officially released the economic white paper on Bitcoin ZK Rollup, proposing the first economic model implementation plan for Bitcoin-native zkRollup. This plan fundamentally addresses issues such as incentive imbalance, concentrated role costs, and low verification efficiency existing in the current BTC L2 system through the 'General Operator Role Rotation Mechanism' and 'Multi-Round Challenge Mechanism', providing a solid economic foundation for BTCFi.

Systemic economic design challenges faced by BTC L2

Although Bitcoin Layer 2 technology has made significant progress in recent years, existing Bitcoin Rollup solutions still have systemic flaws in economic design:

  • Lack of incentive mechanisms for key protocol roles (such as orderers, provers, challengers, consensus committees, etc.)

  • Withdrawal cycles can last up to two weeks, significantly reducing capital utilization efficiency and user experience.

  • Insufficient rewards and punishment mechanisms for challengers weaken the security assurances of the protocol.

These issues fundamentally arise from isolated roles, concentrated costs, and incomplete mechanism design, severely restricting the long-term sustainability of Bitcoin Layer 2 networks.

GOAT Network's latest economic model systematically provides a solution to the aforementioned pain points.

  • General Operator Role and Rotation Mechanism

The Rollup system involves multiple roles, each with different responsibilities and costs. Establishing a fair and efficient economic model has always been a challenge. GOAT Network pioneered the 'Universal Operator' mechanism, unifying all roles such as orderers, provers, publishers, and challengers into the same identity to ensure:

  • Achieve dynamic balance between revenue and cost through role rotation

  • Achieve high decentralization and network security

  • Lower the participation threshold for small nodes; heavy roles only need to bear responsibilities occasionally

  • Multi-round challenge mechanism, compressing challenge cycles to within 24 hours

GOAT Network introduces a multi-round challenge mechanism based on BitVM2, where each state submission will trigger sequential verification from multiple challengers.

  • Randomly assign a challenger for each round, e.g., one round every 2 hours for a total of 12 rounds;

  • Once a challenge is successful, not only is the fraudster punished, but the challengers from the previous rounds who failed to fulfill their duties will also be penalized;

  • The final confirmation time is compressed from 7-14 days to within 24 hours, greatly improving user experience and capital efficiency;

  • Maintaining a '1-of-n' honest assumption, ensuring high coverage and security; specifically, if only 1 out of n participants is honest, the system can still remain secure.

  • Incentive Compatibility and Anti-Malicious Mechanisms

All operators must stake within the GOAT network and accept role scheduling and punishment constraints:

  • Role rotation and cost cross-subsidy mechanisms incentivize participants to maintain stability and honesty in the long term;

  • Honest behavior earns stable returns (ordering fees, challenge rewards, etc.);

  • Fraudulent or unfulfilled duties will result in deductions from staked assets;

The system constructs a stable honest motivation closed loop through the 'Rotation + Staking + Economic Returns' mechanism, ensuring that participants maintain network security in the long term.

  • Security via Cryptoeconomics

To further strengthen the system's resistance to attacks and honest participation motivation, GOAT Network has also built a complete cryptoeconomic security mechanism.

  • Implement dual punishment mechanisms between L1 and L2 through zkMIPS and Bitcoin scripts;

  • Role allocation adopts a random mechanism to effectively prevent collusion and bribery;

  • Each round is supervised by participants with stakes to ensure no one can 'free ride'.

Ultimately, the system realizes an incentive-compatible, secure, and efficient operating environment through the 'Staking-Random-Punishment' triple logic.

Building an infrastructure that integrates economy and technology for BTCFi

Through this design, GOAT Network not only implements Bitcoin-native zkRollup at the technical level but also establishes an incentive closed loop for BTC Layer 2 at the economic model level:

  • Achieved trustless efficient challenges;

  • Ensuring fairness and sustainability for participants;

  • Providing a secure, efficient, and sustainable underlying platform for financial innovation on Bitcoin (BTCFi).

Through the economic design built on the general operator mechanism, BitVM2, and zkVM, GOAT Network achieves systematic sustainable security assurance.

"Without a sustainable incentive model, Rollup cannot truly take off. We hope to promote the Bitcoin Layer 2 ecosystem towards a direction of long-term viability, fairer participation, and enhanced security through this innovative economic design."
—— GOAT Network Core Team

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