ICP Further Advances Chain Fusion With Latest Bitcoin Milestone: Deuterium
Over the past year, Chain Fusion technology has made impressive progress following the ambitious goals set forth in its roadmap. The Tritium milestone, achieved in May, enabled full support for Ethereum and other EVM chains, enabling secure transactions, token transfers, and enhanced functionality for developers to build multichain applications.
In July 2024, the launch of the test phase for the Deuterium Milestone was announced. This test phase introduced threshold Schnorr signing, enabling support for Bitcoin taproot transactions on ICP as well as direct integration with other chains, further simplifying the way developers build multichain applications. This milestone also introduced on-chain Bitcoin block headers, making it possible for canister smart contracts to be able to access and verify the complete content of a Bitcoin block.
Today, the Deuterium Milestone moves from the testing phase to the official live production phase. This blog post will explore the features from this milestone and how ecosystem projects plan to leverage these superpowers to build more secure and functional decentralized applications.
What Does the Chain Fusion Deuterium Milestone Introduce?
ICP’s threshold ECDSA signatures laid the groundwork for the protocol-level integration with the Bitcoin network, introducing a new paradigm for cross-chain interoperability. Threshold signatures are like a secret handshake between two parties, proving that one person has signed off on something without revealing their secret code. These signatures make it possible for canisters to securely hold and transfer assets across various blockchains by enabling nodes to collectively generate and manage private keys without ever fully reconstructing them. This functionality allows canister smart contracts to submit native Bitcoin transactions and interact seamlessly with Ethereum and other EVM chains.
Building on this strong foundation, the introduction of threshold Schnorr signatures with the Deuterium Milestone marks a significant leap forward. Compared to t-ECDSA signatures, t-Schnorr signatures are faster, simpler, and more secure.Threshold Schnorr signatures unlock new possibilities, including etching Bitcoin Runes, inscribing Ordinals, bridging BRC-20 tokens, and signing taproot transactions on the Bitcoin base layer.
Additionally, the Deuterium milestone introduces on-chain Bitcoin block headers to ICP. This means that canister smart contracts can access and verify the complete content of a Bitcoin block, a feature that becomes increasingly valuable as more protocols write critical data to Bitcoin block headers.
ICP’s Ecosystem Projects Harnessing New Capabilities from the Deuterium Milestone
Chain Fusion technology allows ICP smart contracts to directly read and write on the Bitcoin network. With the Deuterium milestone, Chain Fusion introduces t-Schnorr that now enables ICP smart contracts to handle taproot transactions. Most of the metaprotocols such as Ordinals, BRC-20, Atomical, and others, use these taproot transactions. This means that ICP smart contracts unlock completely decentralized workflows with these metaprotocols for the first time.
ICP ecosystem projects are fully prepared to leverage these new workflows to unlock the Bitcoin economy.
Bitfinity Network
Bitfinity is an EVM based Bitcoin L2 built on the ICP network and it will be using threshold Schnorr signatures to bring a whole new range of possibilities. By enabling BRC-20 tokens — one of the most popular standards on Bitcoin — to be seamlessly incorporated into the Bit-Fusion bridge framework, Bitfinity is making it possible for these tokens to migrate to the Bitfinity network. Once there, they can be used in a wide range of DeFi applications, from lending and borrowing, to staking and yield farming.
No more vulnerable bridges or workarounds. Instead, users can directly leverage Bitcoin’s liquidity within a fully integrated DeFi environment. Bitfinity is also working on solutions that may enable Ordinals to be migrated to the Bitfinity network. By combining these advanced features with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility, Bitfinity is set to bring a new range of DeFi and blockchain applications to the Bitcoin network.
This not only enhances what’s possible on Bitcoin, but also deepens its integration into the broader blockchain ecosystem, driving innovation and creating new opportunities for both developers and users.
Omnity
As a developer, you may have struggled with the limitations of relying on public RPC services or faced challenges when attempting to verify blockchain data independently. These hurdles can create inefficiencies and security risks, hindering your ability to build truly ‘decentralized’ applications.
Omnity is stepping up to address these challenges with the new capabilities unlocked by the Deuterium milestone. As an interoperability protocol with a 100% end-to-end tech stack, Omnity is designed to make the complex world of cross-chain interactions simple and secure. The protocol’s omnichain hub currently extends a variety of Runes primitives — such as transfer, mint, burn, and etch — to Bitcoin Layer 2s. Now, with the Deuterium milestone, Omnity has deployed the world’s first on-chain indexer for Bitcoin meta protocols, fully supporting Runes and soon BRC-20 tokens.
With the new Bitcoin canister block header data, Omnity allows you to independently verify Bitcoin blocks, ensuring full trustlessness. This eliminates the need to rely on third-party services, giving you greater control and security over your applications.
Omnity isn’t stopping there. The protocol is also testing a Solana Spoke by leveraging the capabilities of threshold Schnorr signatures. With this, it can handle Bitcoin taproot assets and seamlessly connect with blockchains like Solana and Cosmos that use the ed25519 signature scheme.
To learn more about how other projects in the ICP ecosystem plan to integrate the features from Deuterium, please refer to this article.
Explore the Chain Fusion ecosystem:
