Why is GOAT Network so different?

Author: Kevin Source: X, @kevinliub

Everything stems from the strategic layout 2 and a half years ago.

When we realized the profound impact of zkVM on the blockchain industry, especially the challenges of unified consensus and liquidity fragmentation, the founders made a decisive decision: All in!

The direction is determined, how to choose the implementation path? This is the primary problem we face in the early stages of the strategy. Among many possibilities, we made a series of seemingly "anti-mainstream" decisions:

1. We did not choose the popular Risc-V, but chose the MIPS instruction set. The core reason is that MIPS is simple, efficient, mature, stable, and supports more opcodes than Risc-V, which is the foundation for building a business, because all efforts are ultimately to support real business applications, rather than a social experiment purely for the sake of popularity.

2. We did not choose to invest BD resources at the beginning, sign contracts with various projects and engage in joint publicity. Instead, we cut off the BD and marketing departments we had hired before and focused on polishing the product, because we believe that all these BD and marketing are irresponsible to partners before the product is mature. Especially when they really want to use it and find that they can't use it, it will be a blow to our brand, not an improvement.

3. We also did not choose the B2B strategy adopted by most zkVM projects. As a bottom-level project, it is easiest to think of the B2B path of targeting applications and chains to use zkVM. However, there is a logical trap here, that is, how many applications and chains will actually use zk, and can these usages really support the high valuation of so many zkVM projects? zkVM still needs time to further reduce costs and increase speed before it can bring large-scale commercial applications. How long will it take to overdraw the future to support the current valuation? Therefore, we chose to build our zkMIPS use case from the bottom up and vertically integrate, and chose the scenario that needs zkp the most, which is GOAT Network - Bitcoin ZK Rollup. We need to control our future ourselves, rather than relying on the uncertain needs of third parties to build our own business model.

4. After choosing GOAT Network, the direction of Bitcoin's second layer, although we quickly launched the alpha mainnet of the side chain to verify the overall business logic, we did not stop there. BTC's native security has always been our goal, so we chose and improved BitVM2's technical solutions and economic models, and fully realized the native security of BTC's second layer by integrating zkMIPS and decentralized sequencers. More importantly, when almost everyone in the industry chooses to build BTC's second layer in a centralized manner, we choose decentralized sequencers to return the revenue generated by the transaction volume generated by the second layer (such as gas fees, mining rewards, and MEV, etc.) to contributors as a return on the BTC's native revenue for providing liquidity and security.

5. When almost all BTC second-layer projects are taking the technical narrative route, we choose the double helix path of technology + economic model, because we believe that technology can only drive business to a certain extent, and the economic model will determine how long and how far your business can go. Our Universal Operator, multi-round random challenger model, etc. are all innovations in economic models.

6. When almost all investors are showing a wait-and-see attitude towards BTC second layer, we choose to firmly look at BTC second layer and BTCfi, because we have a deep understanding of technology, business model and user needs, and we firmly believe that the era of BTCfi is far from coming.

The result of all these strategic choices? LOL, to give an inappropriate example, in the conflict between India and Pakistan yesterday, it is said that 6 Indian fighter jets were shot down before they flew out of the country, including the most advanced French Rafale fighter jets on the market. The reason is that India uses systems from many countries, stacked with systems from Russia, France and other countries, and these systems are isolated from each other and cannot form overall coordination, resulting in a result that looks advanced but is actually vulnerable; on the other hand, Pakistan uses a full set of Chinese fighters, missiles, early warning aircraft and data links to form a complete combat system. Although the performance may not be optimal in some parts, it is the most combat-effective as a whole.

GOAT Network is exactly like this. Our strategic choice is not a single breakthrough, but a systematic layout, driven by technology and economy, to form a complete ecological system.