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.
4/ Regardless, the over-collateralized design of tBTC means that if all signers go offline tomorrow, $tBTC holders still have access to their funds- paid from the signers' bonds.
5/ There are a number of differences between rc.1 and rc.0, which we shipped in May. The big ones are
1β£ a guarded release, including a supply cap schedule for the first 9 weeks
2β£ additional audits
3β£ removing the team's ability to pause new deposits after 6 months
6/ The supply cap grows weekly- starting at 100 BTC, then 250, 500, 750, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, and finally 3000 BTC. This schedule was difficult to come up with, balancing safety, growth, and utility.
7/ It's hard to limit the growth of your own work, but we believe it's in the best interest of users and the wider DeFi space to tread carefully.
8/ Another major difference with this release is the state of the ecosystem. The advent of liquidity mining, pioneered by @kaiynne and Synthetix and ignited by @compoundfinance, has introduced an entirely new market dynamic.
9/ Many liquidity providers have become mercenary "yield farmers", moving from project to project harvesting new tokens. π§βπΎπ
Liquidity is no longer the moat it once was.
10/ As we've watched this market develop, we've seen the value and the cost of short-term liquidity. For that reason, even though we have 5% of $KEEP to spend on liquidity rewards, we're going to roll out incentives slowly, seeking to balance stability and growth.
11/ Our first incentive program will launch with @NexusMutal. $NXM holders that stake to provide cover for tBTC minters will be rewarded by KEEP, weekly. This program means any depositor will be able to buy cover for their deposits through the Nexus Mutual dApp.
12/ I'm also proposing what I expect will be a big boon to early liquidity- a new @CurveFinance $tBTC pool. Curve will allow early tBTC minters to build liquidity and, soon, to mine rewards.
13/ So... now what? As liquidity grows and more projects integrate, tBTC will become more and more useful.. and the divide between Bitcoin and Ethereum will grow smaller. I'm incredibly proud of the team and community for getting us here, and can't wait to see what ships next.
14/ It's time to make Bitcoin and Ethereum kiss. #bitcoin#ethereum π
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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 β tBTC.
It's gone through tweaks and improvements over the years, balancing security and flexibility.
3/ Today, tBTC is...
πββοΈ An easy to use, permissionless bridge
π Supported on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, & Solana, with more to come
π Backed by a decentralized network of custodians @TheTNetwork
2/ Since then, MM has launched Swap, an in-wallet trading service. Today, theyβre earning ~$10M a month in fees, charging each user 0.75-1% per swap π³
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/ Whatβs a hard merge?
@tbitls coined the term to describe two protocols merging into a third. Itβs 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 β first.
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 π and cross-chain SPV proofs π§βπ¬ so you don't need to trust a central party for RNG or minting (!!!). Awesome, but expensive in terms of gas / blockspace π°π₯
I've been thinking about "blind" staking β 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.