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Endgame Money
Building the most secure 1-of-N bridging protocol for Bitcoin. First powering the Alpen ecosystem.
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Bitcoin established key attributes of endgame money.
Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21 million to ensure scarcity, permissionless access allowing anyone to use it without approval, and decentralization to prevent censorship. These immutable features protect individual autonomy and financial sovereignty, which are often compromised in centralized monetary systems. Bitcoin’s unwavering commitment to these properties has set it apart from other attempts to create digital money.
Unfortunately, when BTC is used in trusted services, these properties of endgame money are lost.
As bitcoin scales to global adoption, so has the use of services for payments, custody, finance and other applications. However, relying on intermediaries reintroduces trust, undermining bitcoin’s core principles of scarcity, self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, and decentralization. This reliance compromises the freedom and control that bitcoin was designed to provide.
Strata is a protocol which solves this problem by replacing trust in intermediaries with verification of zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.
Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs are a cryptographic method to verify the correctness of a statement without trusting parties that generate these proofs. This means an application using BTC does not have to be trusted to act in a certain way. Instead, it can cryptographically prove it acted correctly. These proofs can subsequently be verified by bitcoin. This marks a shift from a world where we trust services to "not be evil" to one where we verify them not being evil.
Verifying ZK proofs on bitcoin with Strata is scalable, flexible, trust-minimized and requires no changes to bitcoin.
Nearly any existing feature, service or application can be re-built, using ZK, to prove the properties of bitcoin have been respected. A proof can be used to:
- Prove no more than 21,000,000 BTC were ever created.
- Prove a user’s funds cannot be stolen nor censored.
- Prove a transaction is valid while keeping the contents of it private.
- Prove bitcoin was not rehypothecated nor fractionally reserved.
ZK proofs give the freedom to build a global and scalable monetary system on-top of bitcoin without the attributes of bitcoin as endgame money being violated.
- Prove no more than 21,000,000 BTC were ever created.
- Prove a user’s funds cannot be stolen nor censored.
- Prove a transaction is valid while keeping the contents of it private.
- Prove bitcoin was not rehypothecated nor fractionally reserved.
ZK proofs give the freedom to build a global and scalable monetary system on-top of bitcoin without the attributes of bitcoin as endgame money being violated.
Verifying ZK proofs on bitcoin enables the remaining attributes of endgame money.
Endgame money is the ultimate expression of freedom. It’s a system where anyone, anywhere, can decide how they use their money, and that choice is enforced immutably and transparently. It’s opt-in, never forced, and resistant to manipulation by any authority. It scales to meet the needs of the entire world, offering the flexibility to express any use case while maintaining integrity. Bitcoin gave us the best store of value, and combined with verifiable computation, it will become endgame money for the world.