Let’s kickstart the discussion on decentralised Schnorr signatures and bringing in the nascent token standards on BTC to the IC.
The IC has powerful capabilities with Bitcoin and could in time serve as a powerful L2 for Bitcoin transactions. We have already seen the #Ordi token - built on the Schnorr signature scheme which was enabled by the Segwit and Taproot forks - reach over $1bn in market cap. Despite this, Bitcoin does not have a suitable DeFi layer. Almost all websites that allow for trading these tokens are centralised.
The IC with its decentralised key-signing infrastructure and http outcall technology, therefore, has a powerful opportunity to capture the DeFi market for these tokens by building infrastructure that supports Schnorr signatures. If the IC does not move fast in this direction, it will only be a matter of time before competitors like Staxx incorporate the technology.
There is strong support in the community for this feature, with Bitfinity@AstroX@bob11@brutoshi@neeboo@dfisher@bitbruce Crowd-Fund NFT, Sonic and many others voicing their support. As such, we’d like to start a community conversation to kick-start the development of the feature, with a focus on how we can bring this feature to market as soon as possible.
There are already a couple of great libraries for threshold Schnorr signatures:
We’d love to hear your thoughts @manu@dieter.sommer@Roman@mariop regarding how quickly we can bring this feature to market, and perhaps to also have a working group on the feature or the broader topic of bringing Bitcoin tokens into the ecosystem.
I think it’s necessary to do this! IC deep development makes IC users and IC development team separated from each other’s understanding and demand, IC ecology needs traffic, keep up with the fashionable encryption application is the main way to get new users, it is necessary, now that we have integrated bitcoin, we should explore the advantages of IC, with fashionable applications to attract new users! I also noticed some people on Twitter asking: If ICP has Bitcoin integrated, why doesn’t BRC-20 support it?
In fact, we’ve started an initiative to take some steps towards realizing threshold Schnorr signatures on the IC, and, as it happens, I’m leading the research on this.
While it’s too early to say for sure, using a scheme like FROST is probably not the direction we’ll go. The reason is that FROST does not provide robustness in the asynchronous setting. There is a scheme called ROAST (ROAST: Robust Asynchronous Schnorr Threshold Signatures) that could conceivably be adapted to the IC. However, the direction we’re currently leaning is to leverage the techniques and software we already developed for threshold ECDSA. At a super-duper high level, our assessment is that we should be able to scale down our ECDSA protocol to get a Schnorr protocol that is much simpler and more efficient that our ECDSA protocol.
It’s still way too early to give any more details or anything like an ETA, but we’ll share more info when we have it.
Wow, that’s really great news. Glad to hear that we may even be able to leverage the existing ECDSA implementation. It would be great if we could have a working group for this so that the community can follow along with the progress! We are in good hands.
Hi Victor, any way for the community to help push on this? We could bring in a rust developer or two to work full-time on this if there was proper scope for the project and if they could work closely with you and Dfinity to ensure we stay in sync.
I hit on some of this last week in my talk at ICP CC, so I’ll post it here to open discussion. I’m happy to be educated on how I’m wrong, but I’m not going to take “that’s where all the money is” as a satisfactory answer as to why we should invest more time and attention into something that appears to be so relatively destructive to alternatives:
When I think about developing anything more than than the tech necessary to speed Bitcoin to its eventual security dead end…and then I see the irrational exuberance that seems to be bubbling up everywhere, I get just really strange vibes.
It’s cool that we integrated with it, and it was a logical first step for tECDSA, but are we just going to ignore that bitcoin been an operational dumpster fire for a decade, a blight on the planet that has no intention of correcting itself, and has surpassed by far superior tech?
We are going to use the machine that has the power to make bitcoin irrelevant to…enhance bitcoin and burn more carbon?
This would not be good for future us.
Please let me know what I’m missing here because I can’t make things connect.
To be clear, adding Schnorr signatures to ICP isn’t just giving in to some random hype. Schnorr signatures have many applications, and in many ways are superior to ECDSA.
And then yes, we are going to use ICP to make Bitcoin better. Then let’s use ICP to make ETH better. Then let’s use ICP to make Web2 better. Then we win.
What are some of the aspects in which Schnorr signatures are superior to ECDSA signatures? I do not know how much more effective it is than ECDSA signatures in being able to sign multisig as far as I understand with a smaller signature size and being able to verify multiple transactions at once. Could you please tell me what exactly it is better and what it can do?
(BTC L2 ,Meta-Protocols and more) will explode in the next year, we have to make full use of the existing IC’s technology to seize the market and opportunities, time and opportunity waits for no one!
