February 29: Marathon Digital Holdings, a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company, said it is incubating Anduro, a new programmable multi-chain layer 2 network on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. According to the press release, it is “a platform built on the Bitcoin network that allows for the creation of multiple sidechains.” “Marathon is already developing the first two sidechains, Anduro, Coordinate, and Alys, which can be further developed by open source contributors. These chains demonstrate the flexible programmability of Anduro. Coordinate will provide the Ordinals community with a cost-effective UTXO stack. Alys, on the other hand, is an Ethereum-compatible chain for institutional asset tokenization. Anduro’s sidechain utilizes a process called merge mining, where participating miners like Marathon continue to mine Bitcoin from the base, while generating accrued income from Anduro’s sidechain. You can earn Bitcoin-denominated profits on trades that do – layer after layer.”
