Lite Paper
Last updated
Last updated
As of October 2024, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization is approximately $2.25 trillion. Bitcoin remains dominant in the market, with a market cap of around $1.23 trillion, representing about 54.42% of the total crypto market cap.
Even only considering those active BTC holders, whose scale is in the range of 30-40 million, they hold BTC with a value of around 800 Billion USD.
However, these BTC holders face limited options for utilizing their assets due to Bitcoin's slow transaction times, limited programmability, and high fees, which make it impractical to move smaller balances known as UTXOs.
This is where NEAR Protocol, a network known for fast transactions (averaging 1.22 seconds) and low fees ($0.0014 per transaction), presents a solution. NEAR supports smart contracts and has an expanding ecosystem of decentralized apps (dApps), ready to offer BTC holders a richer experience. Satoshi Protocol steps in as a bridge between Bitcoin and NEAR, allowing BTC users to seamlessly access NEAR's ecosystem. With Satoshi Protocol, BTC holders need only their Bitcoin wallet to engage directly with NEAR dApps, making the transition secure and convenient.
Meanwhile, NEAR is an advanced network with fast finality, a low TX fee , and full support for smart contracts. There are a bunch of existing and on-going dApps on NEAR ready to serve more users and assets.
Satoshi Protocol is a cross-chain messaging bridge built on BTC-Light-Node and Chain Abstraction technology, that brings BTC holders to the broader NEAR world without any obstacle.
Imagine a BTC user, who can freely move his BTC to the NEAR network by only one regular BTC transfer, and easily access all fantastic Dapps in the NEAR ecosystem directly with his Bitcoin wallet. It’s like suddenly, the whole NEAR world is open to all BTC users.
That is Satoshi Protocol, stands behind this amazing convenience and keeps it secure.
BTC Wallet Integration
BTC users can connect their BTC wallets to access and use all dApps on the Satoshi Protocol.
Rich Ecological Applications And Users
A central hub for Bitcoin-focused projects and applications on NEAR, designed to support native Bitcoin assets operating on NEAR without the need for custody.
High security & Low transaction fee.
By utilising NEAR chain signature, Satoshi Protocol offer extremely low transaction fee with up to 60K transaction per second.
Trustless
Satoshi Protocol, a user-owned protocol, is committed to serving the people without centralized control. Every transaction is fully transparent and verifiable.
Multichain Compatibility
Allow BTC users to use dApps of EVM/Solana, and allow users of EVM/Solana to use dApps of Near/EVM/Solana/BTC.
The user’s Bitcoin wallet public key is the only thing to identify him in Satoshi Protocol. It relates to:
The user’s exclusive deposit addresses in the Bitcoin network;
The user’s exclusive near account;
Here’s how it works: each BTC user gets a unique Bitcoin deposit address and a corresponding NEAR account linked to their wallet. When users transfer BTC to this deposit address, Satoshi Protocol detects the transaction and mints an equivalent amount of spBTC—a token representing BTC on NEAR—in their NEAR account. This setup allows users to deposit BTC from any source, even through centralized exchanges, while minimizing fees. Satoshi Protocol also offers shortcut addresses for popular post-deposit actions, like directly depositing spBTC into yield-earning platforms on NEAR.
Once users have spBTC, they can explore NEAR’s dApps without changing their wallets or needing additional accounts. NEAR’s dApps recognize these users as regular NEAR participants, while Satoshi Protocol acts as an intermediary between the Bitcoin wallet and the dApps. When users need to sign transactions on NEAR, their Bitcoin wallets prompt them for a signature, which doesn’t cost any BTC because the actions are executed on NEAR’s network. Additionally, users can pay NEAR gas fees in a variety of tokens, including stablecoins, protocol tokens, and Satoshi Protocol’s own governance token. Real-time token prices are provided by oracles, which calculate equivalent gas costs.
Users can access NEAR Dapps with their Bitcoin wallet, without any modification on either wallet or Dapp side.
As mentioned above, A Satoshi Bridge user would have his own NEAR account behind the scenes. That account is actually controlled by his Bitcoin wallet.
When that user starts to access NEAR Dapps, they treat him as a regular NEAR user. Actually, no Dapps can distinguish him from other users, cause Satoshi Bridge would act as another regular NEAR wallet, except it is an adaptor that stands in the middle of those Dapps and the user’s Bitcoin wallet.
So, it turns out that once the user needs to sign any action on the NEAR chain when he is accessing Dapps, his Bitcoin wallet pops up asking him to sign the action. Need to note, those signing actions won’t cost users any BTC, cause the signed messages actually represent NEAR transactions and will be executed on the NEAR network, not Bitcoin.
As for the gas required on NEAR, it’s very flexible. Users could pay it in satoshi, or other tokens that Satoshi Bridge supported, including stablecoins, or even notable protocol tokens such as ref, brrr or Satoshi Bridge’ own governance token. Satoshi Bridge uses Oracles to evaluate real-time gas cost in USD value and performs exchange behind the scenes among all supported gas tokens.
Users could withdraw to any address on the Bitcoin network, and the process is as easy as accessing a normal NEAR Dapp, cause Satoshi Protocol itself could be taken as a NEAR Dapp.
And there is a broader withdrawal concept, that is to move spBTC to other BTC layer2s. As NEAR has an EVM layer2, Aurora, it can easily connect with other EVM-based chains, and thus has those notable cross-chain bridges exist on NEAR. Like using other NEAR Dapps, Satoshi Bridge users could also access those bridges to cross their spBTC to other BTC layer2 such as Merlin Chain, Stacks, RSK and etc.
Chain Abstraction is a groundbreaking technology built on NEAR. Chain signature, as a core part of Chain abstraction, enables all accounts, including smart contracts, to sign and execute transactions across multiple blockchains.
This unlocks the next level of blockchain interoperability by giving ownership of diverse assets, cross-chain accounts, and data to every single NEAR account.
All the deposit addresses in the Bitcoin network, and all the NEAR accounts we provide for users are all generated under NEAR Chain Abstraction technology.
NEAR Chain Abstraction uses on-chain MPC signing to achieve a public key with no actual private key. Using path, caller account ID, and Crypto-algorithm as additional seeds, we can generate as many public keys as we need, and request signing a corresponding signature through Chain Signing Service on-chain.
Satoshi Protocol uses users’ Bitcoin wallet public key as the path to distinguish users. Then users’ exclusive deposit addresses could be generated safely. These addresses are naturally connected to the users, which is why Satoshi Bridge can handle user deposits through regular transfers without any additional information.
Similarly, the chain signing public key generated according to the user’s Bitcoin wallet public key is then used to be the only full access key of the user’s NEAR account. In this way, Satoshi Protocol can easily verify the NEAR TX signed by the user’s Bitcoin wallet, and then request chain signature on behalf of the user’s NEAR account.
BTC light client plays a key role in verifying Bitcoin network TXs. Satoshi Protocol leverages it to tell if a user’s deposit actually happened and is acknowledged on the Bitcoin network.
Also, to tell if a withdrawal TX has been broadcasted and acknowledged on the Bitcoin network so that Satoshi Bridge could manage the used UTXO accordingly.
Satoshi Protocol uses Oracle to fetch real-time token prices. Those prices would be used in the calculation of the corresponding gas token.
Oracle providers, such as Pyth Oracle, have their dedicated oracle smart contracts on NEAR network. And there are a bunch of off-chain services constantly feed price of kinds of tokens to them. Those oracle smart contracts have the ability to verify these price information is valid and in time.
Once users kick off on-chain activities, Satoshi Protocol would invoke a cross-contract call to query the price of given gas tokens at that moment, and in turn figure out a specific amount that will be charged from users to cover the real NEAR token gas needed.
