Sergio Demian Lerner
Sergio Demian Lerner is a pioneering Bitcoin L2 researcher. As early as 2012, he proposed P2PTradeX, the idea behind all validating bridges. In 2016 he designed the Rootstock sidechain, including its merge-mining subsystem, and bridge, which then he helped transform into the current Powpeg, one of the first HSM-secured federated bridges. He also published the first drivechain BIP, and discovered a critical Bitcoin vulnerability affecting many Bitcoin bridges: the Merkle node type confusion. He designed the Hawkclient, a validating bridge between Rootstock and Ethereum in the PoW era. Currently he is part of the team that develops the new BitVMX disputable computing platform, a key component for building more decentralized Bitcoin bridges. As an entrepreneur, he co-founded several crypto-tech companies such as RSK Labs, Coinspect and Fairgate Labs.
Sessions
For more than 6 years, Rootstock has been relying on a federated Powpeg mechanism to secure the thousands of bitcoins that have been transferred to the sidechain. While the Powpeg stands out as one of the most secure multisig systems in the industry, the bitcoin community, unsatisfied with the t-of-n honesty quorum security model, calls for higher standards in terms of decentralization. Until recently, a permissionless bridge was impossible due to Bitcoin script limitations. It all changed in October 2023, with the invention of BitVM bringing the (1-of-n) model. Soon afterwards, the BitVMX protocol was published, extending and optimizing the initial design. BitVMX is general-purpose verification system based on the disputable computing paradigm applied to a RISC-V virtual processor. In this presentation, we describe the fundamentals of BitVMX and we unveil the Rootstock Union Bridge, a new permissionless bridge proposed for the Rootstock sidechain that builds on top of BitVMX. The Union bridge is the first capital-efficient permissionless security-bonded bridge that can extend to hundreds of participants resting on a single honest verifier.
This panel, led by Janszg of Bitcoin layers, brings together the top L2 builders in the space to seperate the hype from the reality of scaling bitcoin.