As of April 15, 2025, the Bitcoin community is Short-lived anchor (Ephemeral Anchors), a feature that promises to optimize management of network transactions.
Mempool developer. Show satus output of 0 and the message «op_return At Zero, we trust«.
This development coincides with a recent update from Bitcoin Core, the main customer of Bitcoin. To version 29.0Introduces mechanisms that can change the way Bitcoin committees and transactions are managed.
What is Bitcoin’s “Flame Anchor”?
loss Short-lived anchor They are special types of exits for Bitcoin transactions characterized by having 0 atoshis and a value. script Specifically, network participants can spend time on their daughter’s dealings. This mechanism is known in the art Payment – Anchor (P2A), no change in the Bitcoin consensus is required, but it is implemented in the Mempool policy, the space where transactions are expected to be confirmed by miners.
Main features of Short-lived anchor To allow transactions without broadcasting sufficient committees provided that it is part of a package that includes daughter transactions that covers the commissions required for the entire set.
In fact, this means that Short-lived anchor They act as a kind of “temporary padlock” that allows Bitcoin transactions to be dynamically adjusted from a fee perspective. Network participants can also create this daughter transaction, even those who do not receive other output from the main transaction Add the required fees to make the complete package attractive to miners.
This approach solves historical problems such as Pinning Transaction attacks, attacks that prevent transactions from being seen when malicious actors saturate the boundaries of their members’ packages. 0 By allowing Satoshis outings to be spent immediately within the same package, Short-lived anchor They eliminate this attack vector and promote more efficient committee management.
Relationship of Short-lived anchor In Lightning networks, a second Bitcoin layer solution for fast and low-cost transactions is especially important. Lightning already adopted a similar concept Anchor output Between 2021 and 2022, nodes were able to adjust commissions for commitment transactions using known techniques as follows: CPFP (Children pay for their parents).
Transaction sponsorship arrived at Bitcoin
Another important advantage of Short-lived anchor It is the ability to act as a sponsorship mechanism for the committee. In contexts where transaction rates can be unstable, this feature allows the original issuer to see low-priority transactions without having to pay a high fee.
Instead, a third can assume the cost of a commission by creating a transaction for their daughter. This opens the door to new models of use on the Bitcoin network, such as applications that subsidize user transactions.
However, this progress is not exempt from concern. X Discussion users said anchor They create the possibility of creating 0 atoshis outputs that can increase the size of the UTXO set (an incredible transaction output). This represents the challenges of nodes that need to store and process this information, especially when it is abundant. However, the developer of Lightning Dev Kit He commented that the OP_Return output was not added to the UTXO set, causing user concern.
however Short-lived anchor They are designed to be used within the same transaction package, and their large-scale use can have unpredictable long-term implications for network scalability. This is an issue that the technical community needs to closely monitor.
in conclusion, Short-lived anchor They represent a step forward in optimizing the Bitcoin network and provide elegant solutions to technical issues such as: Pinning of transaction and committee management. With the arrival of PINs, sponsored transactions can be performed on the Ethereum network. However, this solution first reached the Bitcoin network.
The integration of temporary anchors in lightning strengthened the possibility of a second layer to efficiently handle transactions. On the other hand, implementations in the main network open up new possibilities for interactions between users.
