According to Blockworks, Marathon Digital, the largest publicly traded bitcoin miner, has announced the launch of Anduro, a programmable application layer designed to help users create sidechains. The company has started building two sidechains, Coordinate and Alys, which can be further developed by open source contributors. Marathon aims to add a revenue stream and foster developer innovations through this expansion.
Coordinate is designed to serve the Ordinals community by providing a dedicated space for unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs), while Alys is compatible with Ethereum and focuses on the issuance and trade of tokenized real-world-assets. Ordinal inscriptions, a method to embed unique data like art onto the Bitcoin blockchain, led to increased on-chain activity in 2023. Tokenizing physical and financial assets, such as debt securities or real estate properties, has been discussed by various traditional financial players.
The launch of Anduro comes a week after Marathon Digital introduced a bitcoin transaction submission service called Slipstream. Crypto miners have been seeking to diversify revenue streams in anticipation of the bitcoin halving, an event expected to put financial stress on the sector as miner rewards decline.
Marathon Digital CEO Fred Thiel stated that the creation of Anduro offers a potential new source of fee revenue. Anduro's sidechains utilize merged mining, a process that allows for blocks to be mined on multiple networks simultaneously. Miners could earn BTC from transactions on Anduro's sidechains while continuing to mine bitcoin on the base-layer, according to Marathon. Thiel added that by extending the functionality of bitcoin, Anduro may be able to increase bitcoin's adoption, and if bitcoin flourishes, so does Marathon.
