Marathon Digital unveils platform for developing bitcoin sidechains

The company has started building a sidechain focused on issuing and trading tokenized real-world assets

article-image

Marathon Digital Holdings and Adobe Stock modified by Blockworks

share

Marathon Digital, the largest publicly traded bitcoin miner, is expanding its focus to include new protocols and networks tied to the market’s dominant cryptocurrency. 

Called Anduro, Marathon’s new programmable application layer is designed to help users create sidechains. Marathon itself has begun to build two sidechains, called Coordinate and Alys, which the company said can be further developed by open source contributors.   

Marathon’s broader goals are twofold: add a revenue stream and foster developer innovations. 

Coordinate is designed to serve the Ordinals community by providing a dedicated space for unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs), the bitcoin miner said Wednesday. 

Alys, on the other hand, is compatible with Ethereum and focuses on the issuance and trade of tokenized real-world-assets.

Ordinal inscriptions — a relatively new way to embed unique data, like art, onto the Bitcoin blockchain — led to increased on-chain activity in 2023.

Various traditional financial players have discussed the potential of, or initiated proof of concepts around, tokenizing physical and financial assets. Such a process involves issuing digital representations of debt securities or real estate properties, for example, on a blockchain.

The Anduro unveiling comes about a week after Marathon Digital launched a bitcoin transaction submission service called Slipstream.  

Crypto miners have sought to diversify revenue streams in the lead-up to the bitcoin halving — an event expected to put financial stress on the sector as miner rewards decline. 

Read more: The next bitcoin halving is coming. Here’s what you need to know

Marathon Digital CEO Fred Thiel said in a statement 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 at once. Miners could earn BTC from transactions on Anduro’s sidechains while continuing to mine bitcoin on the base-layer, according to Marathon.

“Beyond that, by extending the functionality of bitcoin, Anduro may be able to increase bitcoin’s adoption, and if bitcoin flourishes, so do we,” Thiel added. 


Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the On the Margin newsletter.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.

Tags

Upcoming Events

Salt Lake City, UT

MON - TUES, OCT. 7 - 8, 2024

Blockworks and Bankless in collaboration with buidlbox are excited to announce the second installment of the Permissionless Hackathon – taking place October 7-8 in Salt Lake City, Utah. We’ve partnered with buidlbox to bring together the brightest minds in crypto for […]

Salt Lake City, UT

WED - FRI, OCTOBER 9 - 11, 2024

Permissionless is a conference for founders, application developers, and users. Come meet the next generation of people building and using crypto.

recent research

Blinks Report Image.png

Research

Blinks enable the ability to vampire attack user monetization of existing networks by inserting onchain and financialized functionalities directly within the popular social feeds and digital experiences of today.

article-image

Plus, how the FTX collapse played out in Asian countries

article-image

Kalshi founder Tarek Mansour said Thursday marked the “the first trade on regulated election markets in nearly a century”

article-image

I was excited about being on the precipice of realigning societal incentives and solving many issues plaguing our modern financial world

article-image

Cypherpunk Holdings has rebranded to Sol Strategies in a pivot to a Solana-first investment approach

article-image

BitGo’s wrapped bitcoin (wBTC) has a new custodial challenger

article-image

Make no mistake: Tether makes a ton of money. But exactly how much depends a lot on the price of bitcoin.