Keep Network 2021 Roadmap
Threshold Network, Keep v2, and the New tBTC
Keep Network is currently in a period of fundamental growth, development, and change. Our mission is to provide secure and equitable access to censorship-resistant assets across all major blockchains. With our upgraded protocol, v2 tBTC, we’ll become the most trusted network for bridging non-custodial Bitcoin into lending, borrowing, and saving services and platforms across the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. Through all of this, Keep retains an unwavering focus to creating uncompromising decentralized solutions driven by our incredible community first and foremost.
The roadmap for achieving this in 2021 hinges upon a number of concurrent development streams. First, the KEANU hard merge will bring together the Keep Network and NuCypher platforms and communities into what will be called Threshold Network. The process of bringing this unprecedented union to fruition has been a revelation, not only for our respective communities and teams, but for the whole blockchain industry. The KEANU process and the resulting Threshold Network are proving that cooperation and decentralization are possible in a competitive market, and the resulting merged product will strengthen the utility and resiliency of both platforms, while creating an anchor in the sector of private, cross-chain value bridges supported by threshold cryptography.
After months of community collaboration and development, the KEANU merge is in the final stages of confirmation and Threshold Network is coalescing. As always, we invite our community members and anyone interested in learning more to participate in our Discord. Throughout the summer, we’ll be building and fine-tuning the merge towards an official launch.
From a wider lens, threshold cryptography will soon be a household primitive across all major networks because it enables permissionless movement of assets, secure and equitable access to censorship-resistant assets across all major blockchains. Unhappily, custodial providers of wrapped assets like exchanges threaten the underlying network’s censorship resistance by allowing a minority of participants to change the underlying rules. Systems based on threshold cryptography are purely mathematical, completely transparent, and non-custodial.
The first step in achieving Keep v2 is Coverage Pools, a new money-lego in the Keep ecosystem, Coverage Pools provide a backstop for tBTC, a buyer of last resort in tBTC v1, and insurer against fraud in tBTC v2. Coverage Pools will unlock more scalability and growth for tBTC v1, and will be an essential piece of v2. When they launch, Keep Coverage Pools will pave the way for a seamless rollout towards v2 on the new KEANU network.
We’ve been developing v2 in public with deep community collaboration. When it launches later this year, v2 tBTC will be as easy and seamless to use as any custodial bridge, like WBTC, while maintaining the highest standard of censorship-resistance anywhere in the market — by far. And that’s incredibly important. The promise of cryptocurrency and decentralized networks is permissionless ownership and equitability. As more of the world’s legacy elements become involved in the blockchain space, the integrity of a decentralized option in bridging BTC to the wider blockchain ecosystem is of paramount importance. But we know that without first-in-class scalability and UX, integrity alone isn’t enough to make a difference. v2 tBTC will bring together these twin priorities in a way that we believe will situate tBTC as the primary option in BTC bridging — without compromising on the philosophies upon which this whole industry was built.
Keep Network has always maintained a primary focus on security and censorship-resistance — both in the platform itself and the team and community under the hood that make it all possible. The v2 launch will see the platform decentralize management via a DAO structure that makes good on our commitment to this decentralized philosophy. One of the goals of the network is to achieve 100,000 BTC bridged across major chains. It’s only with the support and collaboration of our community that satisfying this goal will be possible — and we are well on our way.
As always, we invite you to join us on the journey by joining the Keep Discord and collaborating on our mission.
