Spacechain

A modest sidechain proposal

Invented by Ruben Somsen
Presented by Super Testnet
What we will cover today

● Spacechain has two parts

○ Blind merge mining
○ 1 way price peg
● How to do blind merge mining
● Spacechain use cases
● 1 way price peg versus 2 way price pegs
● Demo
Regular merge mining

Blockchains need to know the order of blocks

With merge mining, bitcoin blocks contain two

hashes corresponding to 2 sets of transactions: Hash 1:
abababab…
transactions in the bitcoin block and transactions in
a sidechain block Hash 2:
cdcdcdcd…
Regular merge mining needs special mining
software and helps proliferate altcoins
Blind merge mining

● Bitcoin miners need no special software

● They don’t need to know it’s happening
● They still make money off it
● We can do it with a soft fork
○ BIP301 is designed specifically for this
○ SIGHASH_NOINPUT or OP_CTV or OP_VAULT work too
● We can also do it without a soft fork if we accept some tradeoffs
 Please buy this Um, I can make a
The 1 way peg spacecoin for 1.2
btc
spacecoin for 1
btc, so no

Burn X bitcoins via OP_RETURN S

to get X spacecoins on the
spacechain

No one will buy spacecoins if

creating them is cheaper

So there’s a price ceiling

How to do blind merge mining

There’s no reason why a hash has

to be created by a miner

All we really need is a linked list of

OP_RETURNS (or witness data)

Anyone can make these with

regular bitcoin transactions
Who produces these blocks?

Ordinary bitcoin utxos can only be

spent by one person

Using anyone_can_spend can lead ANY

to outages on the spacechain ONE
CAN
The prepaid model fixes this, or SPEND
any covenant soft fork, or BIP301
Anyone_can_spend model
546
sats
● Put a dust amount of sats in an
anyone_can_spend address – the ACSA
● Look for a “linked list” of txs containing a
hash and recreating the ACSA output
● Thefts are detectable: the linked list suddenly points to a new address
● If that happens, let anyone get the linked list going again by making a
new ACSA output
 Just trust us bro
Prepaid model
Also, give us 3 btc

20+ people make an N of N multisig and

crowdfund some sats

They cosign a linked list of BMM txs

Users trust 1+ of the original 20

Loop forever

This model has an expensive upfront cost

Covenants

A covenant is a soft fork that lets you

specify outputs in your locking script

The spender of your money must create

those outputs or their transaction fails

Any covenant can force the spender to

recreate the ACSA output recursively
Spacechain use cases

Destroy all altcoins (or at

least prove they’re scams)

Domain name records

KILL
Stablecoins and NFTs 🤮

Play with 2 way pegs

SHILL
Comparison with 2 way pegs

A federated sidechain is a blockchain run by a

No soft fork needed
group of people with money in an M-of-N multisig
To add money to a federated sidechain, send it to
No soft fork needed
the multisig to get same amount on the sidechain
To take money off a federated sidechain, ask the
No soft fork needed
federation to send it to you from their multisig
Comparison with 2 way pegs

A drivechain is a blockchain where you make a

Bip301 (soft fork)
hash of each block and put those in bitcoin blocks
To add money to a drivechain, send it to a bitcoin
Bip300 (soft fork)
address controlled by 51% of bitcoin miners
To take money off a drivechain, ask miners to send
Same soft fork
it to you from the address they control
Comparison with 2 way pegs

A rollup is a blockchain where you make a ZKP of

No soft fork needed
each block and put those in bitcoin blocks
To add money to a rollup, send it to a bitcoin
Needs a soft fork
address guarded by the OP_ZKP_VERIFY function
To take money off a rollup, supply a proof that
Same soft fork
you’re allowed to according to the rollup’s rules
References

1. Shinobi, Spacechain: how it works

2. Shinobi, Spacechain use cases
3. Somsen, Spacechain in 4 minutes
4. Super, Spacechain launcher
5. Support group, Spacechain telegram
6. This presentation