.png)
Welcome To BitcoinOS
BitcoinOS is the most revolutionary technical breakthrough in crypto since the dawn of Bitcoin itself.
After fifteen years, cryptographers have finally discovered how to overcome Bitcoin’s inherent limitations to its scalability, privacy, and programmability.
With BitcoinOS, the oldest and largest blockchain network has an operating system that unlocks its infinite potential to secure the entire world’s data. This can be done without sacrificing Bitcoin’s decentralization, compromising its security, or requiring any consensus changes to Bitcoin Core.
The secret lies in a powerful cryptographic tool called “zero-knowledge proofs”, or “ZKPs” – a method for verifying information from the outside world without revealing the content of that information.
In July 2024, the BitcoinOS team verified the first-ever ZKP on the Bitcoin mainchain – a feat that experts long considered impossible.
The implications of this discovery are difficult to overstate. Using ZKPs, BitcoinOS allows Bitcoin to fulfill its original promise to be peer-to-peer digital money for the entire planet, while forever remaining a decentralized, immutable, and secure bedrock of truth.
Moreover, ZKPs give developers across the world the power to upgrade Bitcoin in any fashion they like – permissionlessly. That makes Bitcoin not only a sound monetary network, but an unstoppable “permaware” – an operating system for securing an entire decentralized world.
BitcoinOS closes a difficult chapter in crypto history when swaths of developers and investors were forced to flee to siloed, centralized blockchains and services for using their digital assets. The modular architecture of BitcoinOS will unite Bitcoin’s builders, liquidity, and users onto a single “superchain” that feels secure, seamless, and interoperable.
Our new chapter charts a path for the $1.1 trillion altcoin ecosystem to return home to the first, most decentralized, and most timeless blockchain network.
With BitcoinOS, Bitcoin .is officially back.
Bitcoin: Promise And Problems
The Bitcoin whitepaper envisioned Bitcoin as the first “peer-to-peer electronic cash system.” It would enable anyone, anywhere to transact digitally without trusting centralized third parties with their data and assets to mediate payments.
Today, holders primarily value BTC for its limited supply guarantee and lack of counterparty risk, making it the ultimate haven for protecting their wealth.
Unfortunately, Bitcoin still hasn’t lived up to the full potential its pioneers imagined. It can help exponentially more people in countless more ways, but key technical constraints have prevented it from doing so.
- Scaling: Bitcoin’s blockchain can only process approximately 3 to 7 new transactions per second. During peak demand, Bitcoin’s fees often rise to over $10 per transaction – making small consumer payments impossible or utterly impractical.
- Privacy: Transactions on Bitcoin are permanent and observable by all. Poor privacy enables oppressive regimes to enforce outright bans on Bitcoin, hampering network adoption and forcing the world back to tools that the elites control.
- Programmability: Bitcoin doesn’t allow for expressive smart contracts. Without smart contracts, accessing sophisticated financial services like borrowing, lending, and exchange requires holders to put their BTC back in the hands of middlemen.
Poor Alternatives
For fifteen years, Bitcoin developers have endlessly debated how to remedy these core issues. While various solutions have been proposed and built, all come with critical tradeoffs that leave Bitcoin a shell of its former self.
Fundamentally, no past solutions could fully satisfy all three prongs of the “blockchain trilemma”: security, scalability, and decentralization.
- Lightning Network: enables instant, near-free BTC micropayments using bidirectional payment channels in a decentralized manner. Poor UX has forced it back towards centralization in practice, with users forfeiting control of their BTC to custodial wallets.
- Sidechains: complimentary blockchains built to enhance Bitcoin by providing features to BTC holders that the regular Bitcoin blockchain cannot. They require a centralized company or federation to secure any BTC or other assets that were bridged to it from other chains.
- Altcoins/ Layer 1s (L1s): Alternative Layer 1 (L1) networks with their own security mechanisms, programming languages, and functionality. Altcoins are less secure than Bitcoin, have more centralized governance, and require a token other than BTC to use their systems.
- Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs): Formal requests to change Bitcoin’s code to increase its functionality. Tampering with Bitcoin’s code not only introduces technical risk, but also creates frictions within the community and surrounding industry that harm Bitcoin’s precious stability and network effects (ex. the “blocksize war” between 2015 and 2017).
The Solution: Rollups On Bitcoin
What’s needed is a decentralized, Layer 2 (L2) solution that enables permissionless upgrades to Bitcoin. It would respect the purity of Bitcoin’s base layer, inherit base layer security, and require no middlemen to use your BTC.
Bitcoin now has that solution. It’s called “rollups.”
What is a Rollup?
A rollup is an L2 execution environment designed to be more scalable and feature-rich than its parent L1 chain.
As transactions accumulate, rollup chains periodically “roll up” their transactions into data-efficient batches, which are submitted back down to L1 as a single transaction. In other words, thousands of off-bitcoin transactions can be rolled up into one Bitcoin transaction, making it possible to scale the Bitcoin network to thousands of new users.
Activating rollups requires the parent blockchain to be able to verify zero-knowledge proofs, or “ZKPs.” A ZKP lets an L2 rollup prove to the L1 network that certain transactions have taken place without including the content of those transactions.
The Magic Of Bitcoin Rollups
In April 2024, BitcoinOS unveiled BitSNARK – a new software library for efficiently verifying zkSNARKs on Bitcoin, which are a type of ZKP.
Thanks to BitSNARK, Bitcoin users can now create covenants – conditional payments that only execute when the right cryptographic proof is provided.
Covenants are the key to building decentralized Bitcoin bridges – the “holy grail” innovation that enables true Bitcoin rollups. These bridges only require a single honest participant within a pool of potentially hundreds of operators (1-of-n) in a decentralized, dynamic, and permissionless operator set for your funds to remain secure.
One of those operators could even be you!
To better understand the architecture of Bitcoin-based rollups, see the BitSNARK and Grail whitepaper.
BitcoinOS: The Rollup Superlayer
Since late 2023, there’s been a space race of independent projects vying to build functional zero-knowledge systems on Bitcoin, after a key technical discovery – BitVM – made it clear that they were truly possible.
On July 23, 2024, BitcoinOS won that race, successfully verifying a ZKP on Bitcoin for the first time in history. Our achievement has cemented BitcoinOS as the leading pioneer of Bitcoin’s new, limitless, decentralized world.
That’s why we’re taking a responsible, informed, and principles-first approach to fostering this new system. BitcoinOS will honor Bitcoin’s long-standing decentralized vision, and become the ultimate Bitcoin development layer that the world deserves.
Embodying Bitcoin
BitcoinOS will embody the best qualities of Bitcoin. From a technical, political, and security perspective, using BitcoinOS will be almost indistinguishable from using its parent chain – aside from its countless benefits.
- Public Infrastructure: BitcoinOS will be an open-source, public good – just like Bitcoin. Controllable by no one, but verifiable by everyone. It will not be actively governed.
- Bitcoin Level Security: All BitcoinOS transactions are eventually rolled up into Bitcoin transactions. They also fund Bitcoin miners through transaction fees.
- Native BTC: Users pay transaction fees in BTC itself, not requiring users to buy a less preferable gas token.
- Near Trustless BTC Rails: The BitcoinOS 1-of-n trust model is decentralized enough to ward off state-level attackers, like Bitcoin itself.
- No Consensus Changes: BitcoinOS lets Bitcoin thrive while remaining, stable, secure, and boring – just as we like it.
Modularity: Uniting The Crypto Ecosystem
BitcoinOS isn’t just a Bitcoin rollup.
Rather, BitcoinOS is a superchain of trustless and interoperable Bitcoin rollups. It unifies the liquidity, userbase, and developer network of all rollups within the ecosystem – all of which may feature custom programming languages and other features built to developers’ needs.
What’s more, users of any rollup on BitcoinOS may seamlessly and trustlessly move their assets between other rollups and applications within the BitcoinOS system. From their point of view, it will feel like using a single chain that can do everything.
This is the most unique and powerful selling point of BitcoinOS, putting its development potential leagues ahead of alternative layer 1s and competing L2 systems.
All BitcoinOS rollups settle their transactions to Bitcoin using ZK proofs verified by a shared, open, and permissionless operator set.
From a bird’s eye view, BitcoinOS divides the new crypto ecosystem into four layers.
- Bitcoin Core (L1): The main Bitcoin blockchain that provides security for the entire BitcoinOS ecosystem.
- BitcoinOS (L1.5): The execution layer where rollup transactions are compressed, aggregated, and settled. This is the nexus point uniting all child rollups into a composable and interoperable system, through which BTC can trustlessly flow throughout.
- Bitcoin Rollups (L2): The compute layer housing every custom Bitcoin rollup supported by BitcoinOS. All rollups exist as a smart contract on BitcoinOS.
- Bitcoin Applications (L2+): The suite of decentralized applications built into individual rollups. With BitcoinOS, users can seamlessly move their BTC between exchanges, lending platforms, and privacy applications on different rollups as if they all existed on one chain.
Why BitcoinOS Rollups Beat Everything
Under the BitcoinOS rollup model, the centralization and security assumptions of Bitcoin L2s are reduced to the point of being nearly trustless.
Therefore, Bitcoin rollups satisfy every single prong of the blockchain trilemma in a way that all previous scaling solutions have failed to.
- Lightning: Rollups provide the decentralization, speed, and L1 security guarantees of the lightning network, but without the UX challenges of channel management.
- Sidechains: Rollups boast the flexibility and scalability of sidechains, but they also inherit base layer security, and don’t rely on centralized federations not to steal your BTC. In other words, rolups use a 1-of-n trust model, rather than a voters’ majority m-of-n trust model.
- Altcoins/ Layer 1s: Rollups allow developers to build major financial applications on Bitcoin, the most reliable and popular foundation, instead of acquiescing to the shifting sands of insecure altcoin networks.
- BIPs: Rollups clear a path for builders to create a world of decentralized applications secured by Bitcoin, without waiting for a technically and politically dangerous consensus change to Bitcoin’s code.
Bitcoin’s Unparalleled Opportunity
BitcoinOS is an earth-shattering development threatening radical change to the entire crypto industry. Its existence rewrites our understanding of both Bitcoin’s potential and the role of all cryptocurrencies that live alongside it.
If history is any guide, that change will be faster and more explosive than most realize – and create unparalleled opportunity for those who catch on first.
Fragmentation And Consolidation
Innovative new industries are experimental, risky, competitive, and highly fragmented environments. Over time, effective dominant players begin to gobble up their competition and take over the ecosystem – especially as they exhibit economies of scale and network effects.
Crypto is no exception. Over 15 years, countless blockchains and cryptocurrencies have emerged in an innovative race to build the best decentralized systems, forming many siloed factions of users and capital.
Still, Bitcoin continues to dominate over 50% of the crypto market, despite lagging behind other blockchains on scaling and functionality to this point.
This proves that Bitcoin’s many network effects – its superior users, capital, mining security, brand, and first-mover advantage – are all incredibly powerful.
It’s made Bitcoin the institutional chain of choice, and turned it into a household name heard by virtually every investor.
To the degree chains like Ethereum and Solana are still used, it is only to fulfill the roles that Bitcoin was technically incapable of.
But what happens when Bitcoin is no longer technically incapable? What happens when new systems – like BitcoinOS – let developers build anything on Bitcoin that the altcoins can do?
Theoretically, users would have every incentive to unite around the biggest and sturdiest blockchain, rendering the runner-up networks obsolete.
Ordinals: What We Can Learn
Bitcoin got a glimpse of what this might look like in early 2023, with the rise of Casey Rordamor’s Ordinals protocol.
Ordinals is a system for minting non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Bitcoin, which were previously popularized as speculative digital art collections on Ethereum and Solana.
Mere months after Ordinals were discovered, they took the crypto community by storm. Several software wallets formed around the Ordinals standard, and collectors began driving up Bitcoin transaction fees with overwhelming demand to mint the first instances of collectible art on Bitcoin.
Before Ordinals, Ethereum and Solana dominated the NFT space for years. Today, Bitcoin rivals both chains in terms of daily NFT trading volume and has often surpassed both during excited periods.
Ordinals later ushered in unprecedented fungible token standards like BRC-20 and Runes on Bitcoin. These also saw significant early popularity and blew up base layer fees – even though both are still highly unoptimized for wide adoption.
These technologies illustrate a clear point about crypto and other digital industries. When the market’s dominant player adopts the technology of its fresher competition, it will reassert its authority in a heartbeat.
In other words: you can’t fight really powerful network effects. You can’t fight Bitcoin.
Crypto’s Trillion Dollar Rotation
BitcoinOS is priming Bitcoin and the entire crypto market for a transformative reset. During this reset, enormous money will be made, and enormous money will be lost.
While the crypto ecosystem today is divided across various suboptimal L1 systems, BitcoinOS will unite them together as rollups on the world’s best foundation: Bitcoin.
Between altcoins, stablecoins, meme coins, NFTs, and DeFi tokens, a $1.1 trillion ecosystem has amassed around all the things Bitcoin can’t do. Now, Bitcoin can do all of those things and more.
Combined with its better security and network effects, investors have serious questions about whether they want to keep their capital locked inside a distant runner-up blockchain with no distinct advantages.
At a minimum, the most easily available capital to absorb is the over 154,000 BTC currently circulating as centralized, Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) on Ethereum.
This is $9.9 billion in wealth held by investors specifically aiming to put their holdings to work on a more flexible blockchain. The demand for these services is evident, and BitcoinOS is best positioned to provide them.
For developers and businesses, being first to BitcoinOS is an opportunity for a historic land grab. It's like getting to go back in time and buy Bitcoin ten years ago – except there’s already $1.5 trillion in idle/centralized BTC waiting in the wings, searching for a way to be put to work.
BitcoinOS may very well be Bitcoin’s “iPhone moment.” In the same way, that the iPhone wiped out its less versatile competitors like Blackberry in the early 2010’s, Bitcoin can gobble up its slew of crypto competitors in the late 2020’s.
The only question for investors is this: what side of the trade do you want to be on?
The Way Forward
Roadmap
BitcoinOS has already led the world in verifying the first zero-knowledge proof on Bitcoin. It is now working with leading, existing L2 projects interested in launching independent rollups on the BitcoinOS superchain.
One of those projects is Sovryn – the world’s first and largest Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem, which plans to migrate its core DEX to a dedicated BitcoinOS rollup.
Sovryn will bring a thriving community of Bitcoiners to BitcoinOS to pioneer and populate the ecosystem, alongside an advanced suite of DeFi tools they can use when the network becomes available.
It’s Time To Unleash Bitcoin
Bitcoin is now free from the technical limitations that once prevented it from becoming a sound digital monetary system for the world.
With BitcoinOS, BTC can scale from merely digital gold to being peer-to-peer electronic cash usable by 8 billion people for daily transactions.
Bitcoin has also unlocked privacy, smart contracts, and a world of functionality that was once the distinct privilege of altcoin chains. BitcoinOS merges all of those features into one interoperable package of rollups with shared liquidity, collectively secured by Bitcoin.
BitcoinOS will soon render inferior scaling solutions like altcoins, sidechains, L1s, and the lightning network completely obsolete.
This will trigger the biggest capital rotation that crypto has ever seen, enriching those who can see it coming, and devastating those who fail to respect Bitcoin’s indomitable network effects.
Finally, BitcoinOS means Bitcoin can upgrade permissionlessly, without ever having to rely on a base layer hard fork or soft fork ever again.
Consensus changes can be contained to uncontroversial patches and maintenance, rather than controversial functionality improvements that threaten the stability that Bitcoin best provides.
It’s time to bring crypto developers, investors, and users back to the ultimate blockchain. The best of the revolution is yet to come, and we welcome you to be a part of it.
Sign up for more updates on BitcoinOS
Follow BitcoinOS on Twitter
Join the Telegram
