Overview
Crypto mining giant Marathon Digital has announced its entry into Bitcoin scaling with Anduro, a multichain layer-2 network. Anduro, utilizing merge-mining, aims to enable miners to earn revenue from sidechain transactions while mining BTC.
Anduro Features
- Application Layer: Anduro is designed to accelerate Bitcoin development and adoption by serving as an application layer and allowing multiple sidechains.
- Community-Led: While Marathon helped incubate Anduro, it is intended to be community-led and driven.
- First Sidechains: Marathon is working on the first two sidechains on Anduro, Coordinate and Alys. Coordinate offers a cost-effective UTXO stack for the Ordinals community, while Alys is an Ethereum-compatible sidechain for institutional asset tokenization.
Governance and Development
- Merge-Mining: Anduro uses merge-mining, enabling miners to earn revenue from Anduro sidechain transactions while mining Bitcoin.
- Decentralized Governance: Governance is initially managed by a consortium of Bitcoin-forward entities known as the Collective but will transition to trustless alternatives once ready.
- Long-Term Sustainability: Marathon's Chairman and CEO, Fred Thiel, sees Anduro as supporting innovation in the Bitcoin ecosystem and reinforcing Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work sustainability.
Future Plans
- Partnerships: Marathon aims to recruit influential partners to invest in advancing Bitcoin adoption.
- Industry Momentum: The introduction of Anduro follows the trend of Bitcoin layer-2 narratives gaining traction, particularly after the Ordinals and BRC-20 hype of 2023.
