The RGB++ Protocol Born in the Bitcoin Renaissance

In the latest episode of SeeTalk podcast, Xixi, a researcher who has been observing and studying the Bitcoin ecosystem for a long time, served as the podcast host and had an online conversation with Shawn, the head of SeeDAO incubator and RGB++ Fans researcher. They talked about the background origin of the RGB++ protocol, development disputes, future application potential and other topics, hoping that more teams and creators can understand the RGB++ protocol and participate in the RGB++ ecosystem at an early stage.

The following is the main content sorted out based on the podcast audio:

1. Why are you so passionate about RGB++?

Shawn: I have participated in the discussion of the RGB++ protocol from the beginning, and I am very grateful to the author of the RGB++ protocol for putting my name in the technical white paper.

Last year, I did two main things. One was participating in the Bitcoin Layer 1 asset issuance protocol. I was also the first to curate the first beginner video course and the first developer lecture of the Atomicals protocol. The second thing I put a lot of energy into was the AW autonomous world. I have a research group that I often discuss with. They started to focus on AW at an early stage. We often share regularly. I was very interested in listening to their introduction of AW. Then I started to follow this track, study the article known as the "AW Bible", discuss with various teams involved in the AW autonomous world, and so on. Of course, at this stage, the main form of presentation of the AW autonomous world is still the full-chain game, so I played almost all the full-chain games during that period.

Then there was the AW Assembly held in Istanbul last November. During and after that conference, many people were shaken by the mainstream solution at the time - realizing the AW autonomous world in the Ethereum ecosystem. Most of them were due to performance and cost considerations, and a few people believed that using Ethereum as the foundation of the AW autonomous world was not solid. Since the BRC-20 protocol based on the indexer was very popular at the time, some people proposed whether it was possible to issue assets on the Bitcoin mainnet and then realize the AW autonomous world on the super indexer. This happened to coincide with the direction of another layer protocol I was working on, so I was very fascinated by this exploration direction.

In December last year, I went to Chiang Mai to discuss possibilities with various AW teams offline. Coincidentally, I met Cipher, the author of the RGB++ protocol, there. We had some discussions, but at that time Cipher had not yet thought of doing the RGB++ protocol. Our discussion was mainly about thinking about the future development of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

By February of this year, we felt that using the super indexer solution to do AW was problematic, because the centralized indexer relies on social consensus, but this consensus is far from being as optimistic as everyone thought last year. The RGB++ protocol that Cipher is conceiving gives us a better choice, which is to issue assets on the Bitcoin mainnet, and then use the RGB++ protocol to conduct bridgeless cross-chain with CKB. The AW autonomous world can be realized through CKB and off-chain calculations. So, at that time, many developers, including myself, began to assist Cipher to accelerate the development and implementation of the RGB++ protocol and ecological planning.

The above is the process I participated in from last year to the establishment of RGB++.

Xixi: I see, so at that time in Chiang Mai, everyone met offline and came up with this idea for the second layer of Bitcoin, right?

Shawn: Yes. Actually, when we were in Chiang Mai, we discussed not only the first layer, but also the second layer, because in December last year, the second layer of Bitcoin had not yet emerged, and it was mainly the first layer asset issuance protocol of Bitcoin. We were discussing both directions, including what are the shortcomings of the first layer asset issuance protocol, what better technical features should be available in the future, and how to expand the second layer, etc. At that time, we actually mixed them together for discussion.

So, friends who know about the RGB++ protocol may also find it particularly novel that the RGB++ protocol is both a first-layer asset issuance protocol and a first-layer and second-layer bridgeless cross-chain solution. I think this is related to our open, first-layer and second-layer mixed discussion last year.

2. What are the technical advantages and innovations of the UTXO model?

Shawn: It is true that many people regard UTXO as a very old model, and it has been overshadowed by the EVM account model for a long time. However, now many developers are beginning to flock to the UTXO technical route. Therefore, the current Bitcoin ecosystem actually has two major technical routes competing, one is the UTXO model native to Bitcoin, and the other is the account model of Ethereum. Now there are indeed many teams that are directly moving Ethereum's EVM virtual machine over, so that the applications accumulated by Ethereum in the past few years can be directly used. This is why there was a saying of "Bitcoin's second-layer hundred-group war" at the beginning of this year. In the so-called hundred-group war, most projects directly moved the Ethereum set over.

Regarding the comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of the UTXO model and the account model, you can go to the Internet to search, there are many long articles analyzing. My own observation is that this wave of the rise of the Bitcoin ecosystem is called the "Bitcoin Renaissance". Almost all innovative technologies in the past eleven and a half years are based on UTXO. Although there are many products based on the account model such as EVM, you actually don't see real native innovation here. Almost all native innovations are UTXO. Why is this? Because the Bitcoin mainnet is UTXO, you can hardly use the account model to make very solid and real innovations on Bitcoin.

Take RGB++ as an example. The RGB++ protocol is based on two core technologies. One of them is called one-time sealing, which was proposed by Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd in 2016. It uses the characteristics of UTXO, which the account model does not have. Another core technology is called isomorphic binding, which was first proposed by Cipher. Isomorphic binding can bind UTXOs on two different UTXO chains, so assets can be directly transferred between the two chains without a cross-chain bridge. However, there has never been such a thing on Ethereum. Between the first and second layers of Ethereum, a cross-chain bridge is definitely needed. Its model is that the first layer is pledged, the second layer is generated; the second layer is destroyed, and the first layer is taken back. No matter how it innovates, it will always do so. Therefore, you will find that when many teams move the EVM account model to Bitcoin, they are still doing this and cannot jump out of this box. This is why we say that the real innovation in the Bitcoin ecosystem must belong to UTXO. This is my own observation. Xixi: Recently, I also heard a saying that some of the previous construction models of Ethereum are equivalent to a kind of ideological stamp, and the Bitcoin ecosystem needs some more original and innovative methods that are in line with the characteristics of Bitcoin. CKB itself is PoW + UTXO, which is very compatible with the first layer of Bitcoin, and then isomorphic binding is performed through RGB++, right?

Shawn：Yes. In theory, any two UTXO chains can be isomorphically bound through RGB++, but CKB may be more suitable. Why? Because CKB itself is PoW + UTXO. PoW gives the CKB chain a stronger foundation, and its security will be better. It is PoW + UTXO with the Bitcoin mainnet, which is completely isomorphic, so the synchronous binding between the two will be smoother, although other UTXO chains can also be isomorphically bound.

3. The origin of the name RGB++ and the controversy surrounding the name

Shawn: The principle of RGB++ does not come from RGB, but both RGB++ and RGB use the one-time sealing technology proposed by Peter Todd in 2016. This is their similarity, and their difference lies in the specific implementation. RGB uses an off-chain solution, while RGB++ uses an on-chain solution, which are completely different paths.

Back to the name RGB++, there was indeed some controversy on Twitter before. In fact, in the earliest protocol discussion draft, Cipher called it CKB RGB, because he felt that this protocol and the RGB protocol both used the one-time sealing technology, although this technology was not proposed by the RGB protocol, and CKB was used as the second layer to provide smart contract capabilities, so he thought it was better to call it CKB RGB.

At that time, many developers from the open source community had joined. When discussing the name of the protocol, the vast majority of participants opposed the name CKB RGB. They believed that from the perspective of modularity and composability, the difference between it and the RGB protocol was probably similar to the relationship between C and C++. Because C++ is more composable in modularity, everyone thought it would be better to call it RGB++. This proposal was supported by most people, including me, so the name RGB++ was used. Therefore, the name RGB++ was proposed by a group of developers in the open source community.

The controversy over the name RGB++ was mainly due to some relatively negative views expressed by the RGB team on Twitter. What everyone sees is just the surface of this matter. In fact, there was a long period of communication and discussion between the RGB++ open source community and the RGB Association. The RGB protocol has been repeatedly overturned and restarted for some reasons. In 2019, Dr. Maxim Orlovsky founded the LNP/BP Standards Association, which is committed to promoting the development of RGB from concept to practical application. At present, many teams are involved in the RGB protocol, but it has never been implemented.

In the early stage of conceiving the RGB++ protocol, we contacted the RGB Association. We also hoped to join this association at that time, because from a certain point of view, the RGB++ protocol and the RGB protocol are compatible and expand its application scenarios, because the RGB protocol specializes in off-chain, and RGB++ is on-chain. The on-chain and off-chain can be integrated and compatible with each other. The RGB Association is controlled by a board of directors, and the person in charge of the board of directors is Dr. Maxim. In March, we actually persuaded nearly half of the directors to support us, and in the internal forum of the RGB Association, their developers are also discussing the technical details of the RGB++ protocol and the advantages and disadvantages of the RGB++ protocol compared with the RGB protocol. I think this is very healthy. At that time, Dr. Maxim had always maintained a neutral attitude and had not expressed his position, so we were still very optimistic at the end of March.

However, a few days before the official release of the RGB++ protocol in early April, some dramatic changes occurred. There were some project parties within the RGB Association. They had been questioning Dr. Maxim in the internal forum for a few days, saying that we have been waiting for so many years, but the RGB protocol has never been implemented, and our ecological projects are going to go bankrupt. You have been saying how difficult it is to develop the RGB protocol and asked everyone to wait patiently, but you see that RGB++ has been developed in two months and is about to be released. At that time, their internal debate was very intense. Many ecological projects, regardless of their mentality or motivation, used the fact that RGB++ was about to be implemented after two months of development as an excuse to question Dr. Maxim. There must be a lot of emotional things in this, so suddenly one night Dr. Maxim tweeted and made some unfriendly remarks about RGB++. He also posted a message on the internal forum, clearly stating that the RGB Association was promoted by him and should not be promoted by the board of directors' vote, so this matter caused a lot of uproar at the time.

After the conflict was made public, we also tried to continue communicating with the RGB Association and Dr. Maxim. Later, this matter evolved into a dispute over concepts, so to this day, everyone is still doing their own thing and not cooperating. The idea of ​​the RGB protocol is to kill all blockchains and only keep Bitcoin, so it is an off-chain solution. The RGB++ protocol is an on-chain solution that is completely based on blockchain and has a public ledger. From a conceptual point of view, the two sides did choose completely different paths, and the dispute over concepts was indeed somewhat irreconcilable, so later everyone went their own way and there was no more controversy.

In this regard, the Bitcoin ecosystem is indeed better than the Ethereum ecosystem, because in the Ethereum ecosystem, Vitalik and the Ethereum Foundation have set the overall framework and direction, and have formulated the roadmap from top to bottom, and everyone must follow their plan. In the Bitcoin ecosystem, there is no roadmap. If you think this is good, then you can build your ecosystem and see how many applications are running and how many users are using it in one, two, or three years. I think this state of independent development is very good.

Xixi: Yes, this is also what I think is very interesting about the Bitcoin ecosystem. There will be a lot of disputes, collisions, and exchanges of ideas between different Bitcoin communities. I think this is also an important reason for maintaining the vitality of the Bitcoin ecosystem. In fact, there are many similar disputes in the history of Bitcoin, and it can even be said that it has always been like this for a long time.

Shawn: Yes, there are actually many ideological disputes in the Bitcoin ecosystem, and they are particularly fierce. It is rare that a big guy comes out and says "stop arguing" to calm things down. The Ethereum ecosystem may be different. It is really possible for someone to come out and mediate to calm things down. These are two different styles.

Xixi: Yes, so I think the Bitcoin ecosystem is very decentralized both technically and ideologically, and there are a lot of debates.

4. How do you view the recent sharp correction in RGB++ asset prices?

Shawn: It has only been two months since the release of the RGB++ protocol. In these two months, 5 trading markets have been launched in the ecosystem, including Bitcoin AW autonomous world projects such as World3, relatively mature IPs such as Nervape, and AMM DEX similar to Uniswap is about to be released. Algorithmic stablecoins are also being developed, as well as various DeFi applications, creator economy applications, and social applications. In other words, the RGB++ ecosystem is actually advancing very quickly, but it just needs more time.

In addition, I also agree that a protocol and ecosystem need to have a wealth effect. Only with a wealth effect can more teams participate in the construction of the ecosystem. Therefore, this wave of surge in April has indeed attracted many teams to come in. In the following June and July, various ecological projects will be gradually launched, which will bring more attention and new wealth effects. The price of assets and the prosperity of the ecosystem complement each other. Therefore, I am actually very optimistic about the next period of time. With the implementation of various products and projects in the ecosystem, they will bring more funds and market attention.

5. What do you think of the current RGB++ community culture?

Shawn: I mentioned earlier that asset prices and ecological prosperity complement each other. Eco-prosperity does not only refer to the project teams in the ecosystem, but also includes culture and community, such as the typical clown culture, SEAL community, Nervape community, etc. in the RGB++ ecosystem. Of course, there are definitely some speculators who come here to speculate on assets, which is normal and we will not avoid this.

However, in the Bitcoin ecosystem, you will never hear discussions about how to build a more solid foundation for the Bitcoin autonomous world, establish a view of time and space, and establish physical laws in any other protocol community. You will definitely not hear these discussions, and you can only hear them in the RGB++ community. For example, when we designed the digital object (DOBs) standard, we actually considered more about how to help creators, how to empower the creator economy, and how to help these individual designers get started with secondary creation and sales. Therefore, the RGB++ community and culture are different from other communities. No matter what asset, its price is always fluctuating. A community that closely revolves around asset speculation is bound to be short-lived, because there will never be an asset that never pulls back and keeps rising. This does not exist. Therefore, I am actually very optimistic about the RGB++ ecosystem and the long-term development of its culture and community.

6. How do creators participate in the RGB++ ecosystem? What are the special ways to play?

Shawn: This topic is a bit big, I can only select a few small points to introduce.

The biggest advantages of the RGB++ protocol are two: one is that it provides programmability for the Bitcoin mainnet, and the other is that between the Bitcoin mainnet and CKB, assets can jump directly (Leap) without a cross-chain bridge, achieving complete decentralization. Therefore, you can develop applications on the Bitcoin mainnet or on the second layer (CKB), which is a major advantage of the RGB++ protocol.

I have been paying attention to and participating in the AW autonomous world for a long time, and I have also played many full-chain games. For example, the game Pirate Nation, whose assets are all on the chain, was originally released on the Arbitrum Nova chain and later migrated to another chain (Proof of Play Apex chain). In May, you will find that due to a problem with the chain, the game Pirate Nation was unavailable for 5 days. At this time, as users, we will naturally wonder if our game assets may not exist after waking up because of a problem with the chain. As believers in blockchain, we keep our assets on the chain. Where is the strongest consensus? When we think about this question, most people will give the answer of Bitcoin.

A few weeks ago, I attended Space with World3, a Bitcoin autonomous world project. During the meeting, I asked the founder of World3 why he wanted to come to the Bitcoin ecosystem to do autonomous world. He said that they wanted to be a long-term development project in this industry. Because of long-term development, it needs to be censorship-resistant. They chose Bitcoin because Ethereum not only switched from PoW to PoS, but also issued assets on Ethereum, which might be blacklisted by the US government overnight. From the perspective of censorship resistance, he thinks that issuing assets on the Bitcoin mainnet is the only option. This is why the World3 project chose to enter the Bitcoin ecosystem.

In addition to issuing fungible tokens, the RGB++ protocol can also issue DOBs, which can be simply understood as an enhanced version of NFT. Not all NFTs on Ethereum are on the chain. Its images and data are basically off-chain. They may have been stored in a centralized server at first, and later evolved to be stored in Arweave or IPFS. On the other hand, the entire industry is also concerned about whether Ethereum verification nodes will participate in censoring assets and transactions due to government requirements. In contrast, DOBs not only allows 100% of the content to be stored on the chain, but also allows it to jump back and forth between the first layer of Bitcoin and the second layer of CKB.

For example, in the Nervape project, they released the NeuroApe ("naked ape") on the Bitcoin mainnet, and all the accessories and accessories of the NeuroApe were released on the CKB chain. If I own a NeuroApe, it is on Bitcoin. The simplest way to play is to use RGB++ to Leap it to CKB, without any cross-chain bridges. This gameplay is not seen in the Ethereum ecosystem, because the Ethereum ecosystem relies on various bridges, and RGB++ can directly jump assets to another chain through the isomorphic binding of UTXO. CKB is a Turing-complete chain that supports smart contracts. On CKB, we can dress up the NeuroApe, such as giving it sunglasses and a cigar, and be as cool as you can. Then, I can let the dressed-up NeuroApe return to the Bitcoin mainnet, and the image of the NeuroApe will change to the way I dressed it up on CKB, and the chain will have brand new data. This is the simplest application scenario.

If NeuroApe is combined with Bitcoin autonomous world projects such as World3, it will actually produce a richer gameplay. Recently, these two projects have also worked together to polish the product, hoping to provide users with richer gameplay and attract more users. So I think DOBs are very attractive to creators.

In addition, the value storage feature of CKB itself is also very attractive to creators. If you deploy a smart contract on the CKB chain and it takes up 50,000 bytes, then you need to lock up 50,000 CKB to store this contract. If you issue an NFT or DOB, if its image data is 10,000 bytes in size, then you need to lock up 10,000 CKB to store this data. If you write a poem of 500 bytes, you need to consume 500 CKB to store it. Only when the creation is truly valuable, people are willing to spend so many CKB tokens to store it.

If one day, the holders of the relevant assets may not be the original authors anymore, if they think that this NFT or DOB is not good-looking and they don’t like it anymore, they can destroy it and take back the 10,000 CKB they have occupied. If they think that this poem is too badly written and should not exist, they can destroy it and take back the 500 CKB they have occupied. Gradually, the CKB chain has truly realized the value storage, with birth and death, because things without value will be destroyed and everyone will take back the occupied CKB. This is a very interesting point of CKB.

The RGB++ protocol actually integrates various features of CKB. In my opinion, it is very friendly to creators and is also very suitable for the technical architecture of the Bitcoin autonomous world. Other protocols may only be able to issue tokens and not do other things, but RGB++ has many ways to play, and various applications are also being born in the ecosystem, allowing you to use the assets if you hold related assets. This is what I think is the most imaginative aspect of RGB++.

7. Position of RGB++ protocol in Bitcoin ecosystem

Shawn: On the one hand, RGB++ is an asset issuance protocol on the first layer of Bitcoin. On the other hand, because CKB provides stronger programmability, RGB++ can provide more possibilities for various projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Last year, when issuing assets on the first layer of Bitcoin, we always emphasized fair launch and fair participation of the community. This model actually makes many teams lose the motivation to participate, and there will be a certain ceiling. This is why the first layer of Bitcoin began to stagnate this year, because it needs more new ways to emerge and more capabilities to provide various possibilities for the team. That is why I expect the RGB++ protocol to grow into a de facto standard for project parties to issue assets on the first layer of Bitcoin. Another feature of RGB++ is that it can be cross-chain between the first layer and the second layer without a cross-chain bridge. This feature can bring more possibilities to projects such as AW and games, because these projects also want to issue assets on the Bitcoin mainnet. For their application scenarios, RGB++ is likely to become a de facto standard in the end. 8. Views of Eastern and Western communities and VCs on the Bitcoin ecosystem Shawn: Since the second half of last year, the second layer of Bitcoin has been driven more by Asian capital and Asian teams. In April this year, I listened to some podcasts. Although many Western VCs still say that they are not optimistic about the second layer of Bitcoin and are skeptical, in actual action, these VCs are betting and investing in new projects. My personal understanding is that there have indeed been differences between Eastern and Western capital in the past year and a half, but with the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem, the pool of assets in this track is getting fuller and the financing amount is getting higher. It is expected that by the end of this year or next year, we will not see the differences between Eastern and Western capital, because this difference will eventually be submerged by the pool. Everyone will complete the integration and no longer emphasize what Asian capital is doing or what European and American capital is doing. It is very likely that everyone is doing the same thing. This is my view on the second layer of Bitcoin. For the first layer of Bitcoin protocols, almost all of them were not proposed by Chinese before, and Cipher was able to propose the RGB++ protocol and develop it to this level today, which actually far exceeded my previous expectations. There are actually many professionals in the West who can quickly get the technical features and future imagination of the RGB++ protocol. This is why Bitcoin Magazine, as an institution in the Bitcoin theoretical camp, finally invested in Cipher's team. In the process of promoting the RGB++ protocol, from all aspects, it is actually much better than I expected before. Some things that I was worried about before did not happen. This is a magical point.

Xixi: Did Bitcoin Magazine invest in UTXO?

Shawn: They invested in the UTXO Stack project. UTXO Stack is the expansion plan for the RGB++ protocol. For the entire ecosystem, there are several levels. The bottom layer is the RGB++ protocol, and above this layer is the expansion plan. If only the current plan is used (that is, only the CKB blockchain is used), the performance and cost are OK, but if the number of users increases by an order of magnitude, the expansion plan UTXO Stack is needed. UTXO Stack is expected to be released in the third quarter of this year. This project has also been favored by many top capitals. In fact, to a certain extent, it also shows that these capitals are optimistic about the RGB++ protocol. Otherwise, why would they invest in the expansion plan of this protocol? If you are not optimistic, there is naturally no need to expand the capacity, right?

Xixi: Yes, this is also a kind of affirmation.

9. I hope that more creators and people who want to understand RGB++ technology will participate in the construction

Shawn: I have been involved in the RGB++ protocol and its ecological construction for some time. Combined with my personal experience and some thoughts, I actually hope that more creators and more teams can understand the RGB++ protocol and participate in this ecology.

RGB++ has only been online for two months, but its ecological construction has developed very rapidly. The projects I mentioned earlier, such as Nervape and World3, have demonstrated some of the features of RGB++, but how to further explore more diverse gameplay actually requires the participation of more teams, so everyone is very welcome to join the RGB++ ecosystem.