GOAT Network Launches ZK Rollup Economic Model, Solving BitVM’s Major Challenge: Incentives

GOAT Network today introduces the first production-ready Bitcoin-native zkRollup with a groundbreaking economic model designed to ensure fairness, security, and sustainability.

Here’s how it all works:

Problem: Economic Limitations of Bitcoin Rollup Designs

Despite recent technical progress, Bitcoin rollups face systemic economic design gaps:

  • No foundational incentive model exists for critical protocol roles, such as sequencers, provers, challengers, and committees.
  • A 2-week withdrawal (peg-out) latency significantly reduces capital efficiency and user experience.
  • Insufficient incentive alignment and punitive mechanisms for challengers, weakening the security of the dispute resolution process.

GOAT’s Solution: An Enhanced Economic Framework

Universal Operator Rotation

Considering that a rollup solution involves multiple roles, each with different responsibilities and costs, designing a fair and efficient rollup economic model becomes extremely challenging. GOAT Network unifies all these roles under a single identity — the “Universal Operator” — with universal operators rotating through the different roles over time. This ensures:

  • Balanced cost/profit distribution
  • High decentralization and network resilience
  • Low barrier to entry for small operators, via infrequent heavy roles

Multi-Round Challenge Model

  • Randomly assigned a challenger in each round (e.g. every 2 hours and 12 rounds in total)
  • If a fraud is detected, prior-round challengers who failed to act are slashed
  • Finality reduced from 14 days to less than 24 hours
  • Maintains 1-of-n honest assumption and ensures high coverage

Aligned Incentives

  • Role ration and cross-subsidization encourages consistent and honest participation in long term
  • Challengers are incentivized for being honest
  • Dishonest operators or false challengers are slashed

Security via Cryptoeconomics

  • Dual-slashing on both L1 and L2 (via zkMIPS + Bitcoin scripts)
  • Randomized role selection deters collusion/bribery
  • Every round is monitored by bonded actors—no free rides

Econ-Design (Universal Operations + BitVM2 + zkVM) = Sustainable Security

The result of all these features: GOAT Network becomes more than just a zkRollup. GOAT is the first fully decentralized, economically sound BTCFi base layer.

Learn more: https://www.goat.network/bitcoin-zk-rollup-economic-paper

Media inquiries: GOAT@transformgroup.com 

Follow us on X: X.com/GOATRollup

Chat with us on Telegram: t.me/GOATRolliup + t.me/GOAT_CN

Chat with us on Discord: https://discord.com/invite/goatnetwork 

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GOAT Network Launches ZK Rollup Economic Model, Solving BitVM’s Major Challenge: Incentives
Jun
16
By
GOAT
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