Most of this was written by @liamzebedee, with help from @lightfiend and @CReckhow. Very interested in feedback on the piece and overall system security
We tried to draw fair comparisons to systems like @Blockstream's Liquid, @WrappedBTC, and @binance's BTCB. We also directly addressed the tradeoffs made between this design and .
Hoping this piece clarifies some common misconceptions about user security, the rationale behind the extra collateral, and huge differences in a peg system like this versus a pure synthetic. Enjoy!
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So, @MakerDAO is considering delisting WBTC, which makes up ~10% of DAI's backing.
1/
2/ Since 2019, I've been working on a decentralized alternative to WBTC — tBTC.
It's gone through tweaks and improvements over the years, balancing security and flexibility.
3/ Today, tBTC is...
💁♂️ An easy to use, permissionless bridge
🌐 Supported on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, & Solana, with more to come
🔒 Backed by a decentralized network of custodians @TheTNetwork
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 💰🔥