🚨 BIG NEWS INCOMING🚨
Hey
@everyone !
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing a major collaboration with...
... NuCypher!
We’ve gotten to know the team and community over the years, and have huge respect for what they’ve built. A couple weeks ago, a few shared Keep and NuCypher community members reached out. We all got on a call, and realized we have a lot in common.
We have shared goals: driving the adoption of threshold cryptography, privacy-preserving technology, and decentralized Bitcoin on Ethereum. And we have aligned communities: stakers who want to realize a vision for a freedom-preserving world built on cryptography, and developers who refuse to compromise end-user security.
This conversation led to an interesting idea, and since then we’ve pulled in stakers, community members, and developers from both networks to get early feedback. And now, together, we would like to propose something new... the first decentralized, on-chain protocol hard merge.
We believe that teaming up is the best way forward. As we see every day in Ethereum, cooperation and composability often trump competition. The Keep and NuCypher teams have built similar technology with similar goals. Rather than continuing to split the market, we think we can achieve significantly more together. And while both dev teams will remain independent, we’ll all be focused on a single protocol.
If both communities agree, the product of this collaboration will be a new, combined network to serve as the foundation for the next release of tBTC. Together, we believe the Keep and NuCypher communities can deliver a scaleable, censorship-resistant threshold cryptography network, and end the dominance of centralized Bitcoin on 'Ethereum.
Background
Over the years, we’ve come to know and respect the NuCypher team’s work. NuCypher, like Keep, is a threshold cryptography network. In NuCypher today, there is one application that stakers operate — proxy re-encryption. In Keep, there are three — the random beacon (threshold BLS), threshold ECDSA, and the rest of tBTC.
The idea is to combine the apps from NyCypher and Keep together to run on a new network, jointly owned and governed by KEEP and NU stakers. Stakers will be able to power proxy re-encryption, the beacon, and tBTC, offering more opportunities to earn fees and grow revenue.
Initially, the combined network will move forward as dual deployments, with stakers running separate clients. Over time, the teams will ship a shared network specification and release plan, with the goal of shipping two compatible clients.
Keep and NuCypher combining forces to bring more useful services, and more fees, into a joint network is the surest path to long term sustainability and success of the work-token model for threshold cryptography.
tBTC v2
tBTC v1 is the only decentralized Bitcoin on Ethereum in the market today.
However, our market share is currently limited by economic scalability and high minting costs. The tBTC v2 specification is on a path to addressing these concerns, while also retaining high security guarantees. We believe the NuCypher team can contribute both development and protocol design expertise to assist in this effort, and they have already given critical feedback and peer review to drafts.
Additionally, tBTC v2 requires a significantly higher number of signers than v1 to maintain security under the new architecture. Today, the Keep network has ~200 nodes staked, and the NuCypher network currently has ~2,000 nodes staked. A combined network will provide an extremely robust signer set for tBTC v2.
Finally, combining forces means more bandwidth to drives plans for tBTC v2 forward, including support on L2s like Optimism, Arbitrum, and zkSync.
Now what?
Now the work begins! I’ve posted a more detailed proposal on the forum. We need to discuss this proposal within our community, as well as with our friends in the NuCypher community.
