AUGME: Trust-Minimized Bitcoin Layer2

Abstract

As the oldest and best secured blockchain network, Bitcoin is now over half of the total cryptocurrency market share. Bitcoin Layer2 has been undoubtedly one of the most popular technologies since last year with many projects aiming to scale Bitcoin with turing-complete programmability. However, existing Layer2 proposals introduce extra security assumptions which significantly compromise the guarantee provided by Bitcoin. To address this problem, we propose the AUGME protocol in this paper to enable Trust-Minimized Bitcoin Layer2, i.e., Layer2 secured by Bitcoin without new trust preconditions.