Marathon Digital reveals Anduro, a Bitcoin layer 2 network for crypto mining.

Crypto mining company Marathon Digital has announced the launch of a new multichain layer-2 network called Anduro, which aims to facilitate Bitcoin scaling. In a blog post on February 28, Marathon revealed that it has been incubating Anduro to accelerate the development and adoption of Bitcoin. Anduro will serve as an application layer and encourage innovation within the Bitcoin ecosystem by allowing the creation of multiple sidechains. The layer-2 network is designed to integrate decentralized governance and become the most reliable and developer-centric Bitcoin layer-two. Although Marathon has played a role in incubating Anduro, it will be community-led and driven. Marathon is also working on the first two sidechains on Anduro, called Coordinate and Alys. Coordinate will provide a cost-effective UTXO stack for the Ordinals community, while Alys is an Ethereum-compatible sidechain for institutional asset tokenization. Anduro utilizes a merge-mining system that allows miners to earn revenue from sidechain transactions while continuing to mine Bitcoin. Governance of Anduro happens through a consortium of Bitcoin-forward entities known as the Collective, but this will be phased out as trustless alternatives become production-ready. Marathon Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel expressed the company’s commitment to supporting innovation in the Bitcoin ecosystem, including projects like Anduro. The next step for Marathon is to recruit influential and aligned partners to invest in Bitcoin adoption. In related news, Marathon recently introduced a new direct Bitcoin transaction submission service called “Slipstream.” The popularity of Bitcoin layer-2 narratives has been increasing, and tokens for projects scaling Bitcoin or providing smart contract functionality have seen a significant surge in value.