Crypto Insights
Bitcoin Secure Signing Layer: A Covenant-Free Vault Model Using Taproot
Developer Francesco Madonna proposed a concept called B-SSL (Bitcoin Secure Signing Layer)(whitepaper). It’s a vault model that doesn’t rely on covenants and uses existing Bitcoin primitives such as Taproot, OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY, and OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY. This is significant because most vault proposals require a soft fork.
There are three different spend paths in its design:
- A fast, configurable path for normal operation.
- A one-year fallback path ensuring sovereignty.
- A three-year custodian path for disappearance or inheritance events. All spending conditions are verified and enforced directly on-chain.
There are 6 different keys A, A₁, B, B₁, C and CS, with B₁ and C held by custodians and only used during recovery. This setup allows users to lock up their funds with strong assurance that the custodians cannot steal them. While it does not impose restrictions on where the funds can move to like a covenant, it still provides a more resilient scheme and trust-minimized model for self-custody involving custodians.
Open Systems Come at a Cost: Core Developers Reflect on Bitcoin’s Foundational Values
Following the Bitcoin Core v30.0 release on October 10, the debate between Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Knots over spam and OP_RETURN has continued.
Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell stated that although Bitcoin Core dislikes spam, it must uphold Bitcoin’s principles of openness and censorship resistance. He criticized Core’s opponents for misinterpreting this principle-driven stance as a moral position—believing that Core developers like NFT/”shitcoin” traffic—when in fact, it’s a conscious decision to preserve Bitcoin’s neutrality and censorship resistance.
Maxwell further emphasized that Bitcoin Core developers are building a system they want to use, not making a product, nor are they serving customers. If Bitcoin’s goal were simply to give users what they want, he argued, it would have already been consumed by the “shitcoin” culture, since that’s what’s more popular.
Alpen Labs and Starknet Collaborate on a Shared Glock Verifier to Advance Bitcoin Interoperability
Alpen Labs announced a collaboration with the Starknet Foundation to co-develop open and neutral Bitcoin financial infrastructure. The first step of the collaboration is enabling Alpen’s Glock verifier on Bitcoin to support cross-system verification, enhancing interoperability within the Bitcoin ecosystem, reducing fragmentation, and improving user experience—all while maintaining user control over funds.
On the Starknet side, Glock verifier will be used to secure users’ Bitcoin deposits. At the core of this integration is the Strata (@Strata_BTC), a trust-minimized execution layer securing BTC deposits to the Alpen EVM chain, coordinating verification across offchain systems such as Alpen and Starknet on Bitcoin
Babylon Protocol Demonstrated Proof of Concept: Using Native BTC as Trustless Collateral on Ethereum
Two months after releasing the whitepaper A Bitcoin-Charged Crypto Economy with Trustless Vaults, Babylon Protocol has built a proof of concept showing that native BTC can be used trustlessly as collateral to borrow on Ethereum. “Trustless” in "trustless Bitcoin vault” means that Bitcoin users need not assume any additional trust beyond those made by a native borrower on Ethereum other than trusting Bitcoin is secure.
Cardano and Fairgate Demonstrated Smart Contracts on Bitcoin
Cardano’s engineering team, IOHK, together with Fairgate Labs, recently demonstrated how Cardano smart contracts can run on Bitcoin through BitVMX and a UPLC-to-RISC-V compiler, enabling Bitcoin users to access Cardano-based tools.
Eli Ben-Sasson: What’s Easy and What’s Hard About ZK
Eli Ben-Sasson stated that privacy tech is mature—generating zero-knowledge proofs is no longer difficult; the real challenge lies in user experience.
The existing infra of blockchain is built for transparency, not privacy. The realistic approach is to balance privacy strength with usability, aiming for a smooth, accessible experience while preserving a reasonable level of privacy. Starknet/StarkWare has demonstrated this tradeoff in practice with solutions like Validium and Shielded ERC20, which improve usability without fully sacrificing privacy.
Ben-Sasson emphasized that privacy is not merely a technical issue—it’s a design challenge: privacy only truly exists when everyone can use it.
Wiki Page for Web5: Technical and Social Perspectives on Web5 and Nervos’ Practices
Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, created a dedicated wiki page for “Web5.” The page explores Web5 from both technical and socioeconomic perspectives, including discussions on its technological philosophy and political economy. It also references Nervos’ Web5 rural development initiatives as a real-world practice of Web5 principles.
How Crypto’s Open-Source Ethos Echoes the Enlightenment — a16zcrypto Interviews Nobel Laureate Mokyr
In 2016, a16zcrypto interviewed Joel Mokyr, the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics laureate, discussing ideas from his book A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, which analyzes why Enlightenment culture sparked the Industrial Revolution.
According to Mokyr, the key factor was the emergence of a “competitive, open market of ideas”—a transnational “Republic of Letters.” a16zcrypto noted that this open intellectual exchange is not different from the ethos of open source and decentralization that defines the crypto movement.
