Author: Climber, Golden Finance
Recently, the Bitcoin ecosystem has once again become the focus of the market, and the community has been discussing related projects more and more frequently. At this stage, developers' research on Bitcoin narratives mainly focuses on two aspects: asset issuance protocols and expansion plans. MVC is one of the earliest projects in the crypto market that focuses on Bitcoin L2.
MVC (MicrovisionChain) is a Bitcoin sidechain based on the UTXO model, which aims to solve Bitcoin's congestion problem and create a highly secure and scalable blockchain ecosystem using Bitcoin core code. MVC has the characteristics of extremely high transaction speed, high concurrent exponential scalability and extremely low fees. MVC's architecture supports Layer-1 high-performance smart contracts and decentralized identity (DID) solutions, making it an ideal platform for developing a wide range of Web3 applications.
The head of MVC's technical department is Xiaohui Liu, who is also the founder of sCrypt, a company dedicated to providing a complete development platform for UTXO homogeneous blockchains such as Bitcoin. Before officially entering the crypto industry, Xiaohui was a research scientist at Facebook's Connectivity Lab, making Internet access available worldwide. He also holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, specializing in peer-to-peer distributed networks, and has published multiple papers in top conferences and journals.
Golden Finance also had the honor of interviewing Xiaohui, and through a Q&A session, learned about the value of the MVC project and the technical route and strength behind the project team's efforts to build the Bitcoin ecosystem.
1. Golden Finance: First of all, please introduce your experience in the encryption industry and the role you played in the MVC project. At the same time, why did you choose to devote yourself to the development of the Bitcoin sidechain project?
Xiaohui: I entered the crypto industry full-time around 2017. I started out working on blockchain algorithms and EOS development. That year, there was a huge controversy over Bitcoin forks and expansion. Due to Bitcoin's leading attributes and my curiosity, I began to move into the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Last year, the Bitcoin narrative began to rise, and the MVC project happened to be one of the first projects focusing on the Bitcoin L2 concept based on technical features such as UTXO and POW. Their development team needed technical assistance. Considering the prospects of the Bitcoin narrative and my previous experience in the encryption industry, I became the leader of the team's technical department.
2. Golden Finance: As a side chain of Bitcoin, what technical positioning can MVC achieve at this stage?
Xiaohui: MVC is a side chain of Bitcoin, which mainly solves two major problems: one is performance, which is the so-called higher scalability. Its technology basically follows the technology of Bitcoin, such as UTXO and POW, but the biggest difference compared to Bitcoin is that the block is larger, which can be said to have no upper limit, so the performance will be a hundred times that of BTC.
The second is programmability. Bitcoin itself lacks Turing completeness, but MVC can write smart contracts through the operation code OP_CAT in the Bitcoin script. In addition, MVC builds a cross-chain bridge with lower fees, so it can promote the formation of a more complete Bitcoin ecosystem.
3. Golden Finance: What are the advantages of MVC compared with other projects in the same field?
Xiaohui: I have heard of one or two hundred so-called BTC L2 projects, but most of them are based on EVM and Solana EVM, and have nothing to do with Bitcoin in terms of the underlying technical framework. However, MVC uses Bitcoin's original scripting technology and is built on the UTXO model, so it is very close to BTC in terms of technical principles and can be said to have the same architecture as BTC.
4. Golden Finance: Could you briefly describe the technical route and ultimate vision of MVC?
Xiaohui: The short-term goal of the project is to be more compatible with the Bitcoin network. MVC is the first L2 to introduce OP_CAT to implement smart contract functions. We are still studying how to get closer to Bitcoin. In the future, we will mainly practice the following three aspects:
a. Fully enable OP_CAT opcode: As a Bitcoin sidechain, MVC will use OP_CAT opcode to support Layer-1 smart contracts, enabling developers to build Turing-complete decentralized applications (DApps) under the UTXO model.
b. SegWit Integration: The introduction of SegWit will improve transaction processing efficiency, reduce transaction fees, and optimize the execution of smart contracts, ensuring higher transaction throughput and security.
c. Merged mining research: MVC will merge mining with Bitcoin, leveraging the security and computing power of the Bitcoin network to further strengthen the decentralized security model and attract more miners to participate.
We hope to align as closely as possible with the basic route of Bitcoin, so that users who originally used other chain applications such as wallets and cross-chain bridges can have a more comfortable experience when migrating over.
Another technical route is to continue to expand capacity. For example, the current block size is 256M, and it will be expanded to 2G, 4G or even larger in the future. The Bitcoin network has 7 TPS per second, and MVC must be at least 1000 TPS. It will continue to grow over time. It can be said that the long-term goal is infinite.
The ultimate vision of MVC is to become a Bitcoin sidechain that is fully compatible with Bitcoin, and to help Bitcoin fully realize its scalability and programmability capabilities, ultimately promoting the mass adoption of Bitcoin.
5. Golden Finance: Is MVC an unrealized technology or a real project? Is there a detailed development plan with clear time nodes? Including the construction of public chain nodes, SDK library and language framework, etc.
Xiaohui: MVC is currently the only UTXO based + smart contract side chain project with many applications. It is not just a white paper or PPT concept. On the contrary, the main network of the project has been running last year. And the POW computing power once surpassed BSV and even BCH, becoming the top three computing power chains.
Therefore, MVC is a project that has been implemented long ago and has been running stably for a year and a half. Strictly speaking, MVC was already under development before the Orinals narrative and is one of the earliest Bitcoin L2 projects.
At present, there are many projects implemented on MVC, including wallets, browsers, mining pools, etc. In addition, there are dozens of DAPPs under development in the MVC ecosystem, such as METAID, METALET, SHOW3, etc.
The development plan for this year and next year is to get closer to the Bitcoin network. For example, we will further implement Segregated Witness, Taproot, and joint mining while being highly compatible. In general, we will achieve a closer integration with the Bitcoin ecosystem.
6. Golden Finance: What do you think are the main technical difficulties in building and developing MVC projects? In addition, compared with other public chains and their expansion solutions, what is the difficulty of MVC in terms of development cycle and later technical operation and maintenance (longer or more complicated)?
Xiaohui: Before the emergence of Bitcoin ecological projects such as Ordinals, Fractal Bitcoin, and MVC, people generally believed that the greatest significance of the Bitcoin network was to store value, but now more and more people are beginning to discover that some projects can be developed on Bitcoin. However, due to the late start, compared with public chain ecosystems such as Ethereum, the technical threshold for expansion development around Bitcoin is relatively high. In addition, programming and infrastructure are also relatively early.
However, from a technical point of view, I think the Bitcoin ecosystem is better than the EVM ecosystem, but many infrastructures and tools are not perfect at present, so developers need to devote more time to build them.
The development cycle of the MVC project is longer than that of Ethereum, after all, Ethereum has been developed for many years, but it is much easier than the Bitcoin mainnet. This is because MVC has high-level languages, APIs, SDKs and other tools for smart contracts. In the later stage, including the entire Bitcoin ecosystem, more developers and builders are needed to join in.
7. Golden Finance: From the perspective of blockchain technicians, do you think that the ecosystem formed around Bitcoin will form a large-scale application product structure in the future? How long will this period last?
Xiaohui: I think it is a gradual process. Although the Bitcoin ecosystem started late, it is now catching up with other public chain ecosystems at a very fast speed, such as NFT trading volume and overall market value.
In addition, I think the proportion of Bitcoin ecosystem in the entire crypto market will become increasingly important in the future, but it is hard to say how long it will take. Looking at other narratives, most of them have shown signs of fatigue and lack of momentum in the past one or two industry cycles, but new projects are emerging in the Bitcoin ecosystem almost every week.
8. Golden Finance: What are your personal plans and expectations for the MVC project itself and its prospects?
Xiaohui: When the Bitcoin narrative just emerged, there was almost no concept of L2, and the entire Bitcoin ecosystem is currently in a relatively backward situation, but the performance of MVC is indeed very superior, and the on-chain communication speed is fast and the cost is low. I very much hope that more developers will join the project and develop some excellent applications to prove that MVC is more powerful than other Bitcoin L2s.
Most importantly, MVC can better serve users on the Bitcoin mainnet. For example, when the mainnet is congested, transactions can be migrated to MVC.
In general, I hope that MVC can seize the current stage when the market is most concerned about the Bitcoin ecosystem and make achievements closely around the Bitcoin ecosystem.
