Matt Luongo ✜ Profile picture
Aug 16, 2019 18 tweets 46 min read Read on X
1/ The cat's out of the bag. For the last 10 months, the @keep_project team, building on the work of @summa_one, has been quietly building a trustless bridge from Bitcoin to Ethereum. The spec is up at tbtc.network.

@keep_project @summa_one 2/ The premise is simple. Existing federation-based approaches to Bitcoin sidechains are broken, exposing users to risks of censorship and theft of funds. These aren't acceptable tradeoffs, and they've kept us from better scaling and building with Bitcoin.
@keep_project @summa_one 3/ For years, this problem appeared intractable. There's a widespread misconception that trustless sidechains on Bitcoin require a soft fork because "Bitcoin isn't expressive enough". Bollocks. Bitcoin is ready for this today.
@keep_project @summa_one 4/ We've sacrificed decentralization for years because we thought we couldn't do better. Solutions like Liquid and WBTC are pragmatic approaches, but aren't censorship-resistant. Solutions like @Truthcoin's drivechains are awesome, but require changes to Bitcoin's consensus
@keep_project @summa_one @Truthcoin 5/ Turning an existing expressive chain into a Bitcoin sidechain gives us a robust set of tools to maintain a trustless peg.
@keep_project @summa_one @Truthcoin 6/ The first tool is what I'm calling a multi-federation. Instead of trusting Bitcoin deposits to a single wallet, each deposit in tBTC is dynamically assigned a new, disjoint threshold ECDSA signer set. We're no longer building an entire economy on 15 fixed custodians.
@keep_project @summa_one @Truthcoin 7/ The second is native asset bonding. On Ethereum, signers can put down ETH to ensure good behavior. If they misbehave, their funds can be seized.
@keep_project @summa_one @Truthcoin 8/ The last is validation. Using an expressive chain as a sidechain means we can validate SPV proofs from Bitcoin, proving deposits as well as any signer misbehavior. Our multi-federation is now trustless.
@keep_project @summa_one @Truthcoin 9/ Together, we're calling this approach a bonded, multi-federated peg. 🤓
@keep_project @summa_one @Truthcoin 10/ Solving this problem means bringing DeFi to Bitcoin- and Bitcoin to DeFi. Imagine taking out stablecoin loans against your Bitcoin with @MakerDAO, earning interest on your Bitcoin with @compoundfinance, and trading Bitcoin with @Uniswap- without counterparty risk.
@keep_project @summa_one @Truthcoin @MakerDAO @compoundfinance @UniSwap 11/ It's not just about DeFi. There will be Bitcoin dApps. There will be Bitcoin mixers. And one day, if we're lucky, there will be Bitcoin
@CryptoKitties 😺
@keep_project @summa_one @Truthcoin @MakerDAO @compoundfinance @UniSwap @CryptoKitties 12/ We're not alone. The mechanism design has been inspired, co-architected, discussed, and reviewed by some of the most brilliant folks in Bitcoin or Ethereum.
@keep_project @summa_one @Truthcoin @MakerDAO @compoundfinance @UniSwap @CryptoKitties @_prestwich @zmanian @_charlienoyes @danrobinson @1HowardWu @gakonst @ljxie @zooko @hal2001 @vamsiraju @rleshner @louAboudHogben @FEhrsam @matthuang @paradigm @a16z @polychaincap @TimDraper @DekryptCapital @fabric_vc 15/ This is all great, but when can you play with it? Well, yesterday, we demo'd a Bitcoin/Ethereum dApp at the crosschain.group's first interop summit. We have deposits from the public Bitcoin testnet to a private Ethereum testnet working today. 👇
@keep_project @summa_one @Truthcoin @MakerDAO @compoundfinance @UniSwap @CryptoKitties @_prestwich @zmanian @_charlienoyes @danrobinson @1HowardWu @gakonst @ljxie @zooko @hal2001 @vamsiraju @rleshner @louAboudHogben @FEhrsam @matthuang @paradigm @a16z @polychaincap @TimDraper @DekryptCapital @fabric_vc 16 / Later this year, we'll be rolling over to public testnet. In the meantime, we need your help. Please 🙏, review the spec! We need as much mental firepower as we can get. Poke holes, ask questions. The team and I are right here waiting for it.

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More from @mhluongo

Aug 18, 2021
1/ This Friday, August 20th, will mark the 1 year anniversary of @MetaMask stepping away from free and open source licensing.

github.com/MetaMask/metam…
2/ Since then, MM has launched Swap, an in-wallet trading service. Today, they’re earning ~$10M a month in fees, charging each user 0.75-1% per swap 😳

dune.xyz/tomhschmidt/me…
3/ MM has taken us far on this journey, and they deserve all the success they’ve achieved. But right now, that success is feeling very Web2.
Read 13 tweets
Mar 8, 2021
1/ Recently, a couple @keep_project and @nucypher community members reached out to broker a call. Two whirlwind weeks later, and the teams are putting a joint proposal in front of our communities.

The proposal? To join forces in the first on-chain protocol hard merge.
2/ What’s a hard merge?

@tbitls coined the term to describe two protocols merging into a third. It’s sort of like a hard spoon, but with multiple protocols coming together.

3/ Why?

Both NuCypher and Keep are threshold cryptography networks. Both have off-chain actors that can custody parts of secrets and compute over them, giving on-chain contracts super powers.

Both communities value censorship resistance, privacy, and security — first.
Read 9 tweets
Sep 22, 2020
1/ Big day.

After 3 months of testing, tweaking, and auditing, we've launched tBTC rc.1 on mainnet. I expect it will be the final release candidate for tBTC.

#bitcoin #ethereum 💏
2/ As far as I know, this release is the first permissionless, censorship-resistant Bitcoin bridge on Ethereum. Anyone can mint $tBTC by connecting to the Bitcoin and Ethereum chains, and no one can censor transactions or redemptions.

dapp.tbtc.network
3/ Of course, censorship-resistance is on a spectrum. Today, there are ~67 signers powering the bridge- not 1000s. That number is increasing every hour, and I hope we'll see 500+ signers online before the end of the year.

Read 14 tweets
Sep 5, 2020
What does a "fair launch" mean when the same players are showing up to mine liquidity, over and over? Fair to whom?
If a vanilla SHA-256 coin is launched and it accrues some modest value, it's a freebie for existing Bitcoin miners. The only real cost is the opportunity of the hashpower, but for them it's a drop in the bucket
Fair launches today in DeFi are a subsidy for whale LPs. A strong launch should bootstrap a new community or extend an existing one, not enrich the same 5 aggro DeFi hedge funds.
Read 8 tweets
Sep 2, 2020
So @corolari just shipped a Lightning <> tBTC bridge to Ropsten... ⚡️#bitcoin #ethereum 💏

ln2tbtc.com
It's early and I'm still digging in — here's the Github. But if it works the way I believe it does, the impact will be significant.

github.com/corollari/ln2t…
Minting tBTC on Ethereum's mainnet is a gas-heavy process. It involves a BLS-based random beacon 🔀 and cross-chain SPV proofs 🧑‍🔬 so you don't need to trust a central party for RNG or minting (!!!). Awesome, but expensive in terms of gas / blockspace 💰🔥
Read 7 tweets
Aug 11, 2020
I've been thinking about "blind" staking — staking mechanisms that allow stakers to retain some amount of privacy.
It's a fun problem. Stakers deposit funds into some sort of anonymity pool. Stakers then prove they are in the pool as of some height, and are "eligible" for whatever the staking enables.
There's a wide pool design space. In a system like @keep_project, the funds don't need to be able to be transferred within the pool. They do, however, need to able to be burned by objective rules enforced across the pool.
Read 7 tweets

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