Skip to content

Bitcoin bridge

Note

Although Strata is designed to run on bitcoin mainnet, currently Strata is only running on a bitcoin signet. Any references to bitcoin or BTC in this documentation should be read as "bitcoin signet" or "signet BTC" when describing the current system.

The Strata bitcoin bridge enables the transfer of BTC between the bitcoin and Strata blockchains. The bridge is run by a federation of operators who co-sign transactions to move BTC into and out of the Strata bridge address.

Info

The current bridge design assumes an N-of-N cooperation amongst the bridge operators. Future designs will improve the liveness and safety guarantees of the bridge.

The deposit flow is composed of a Deposit Request Transaction (DRT) which is fulfilled by the bridge federation with a Deposit Transaction (DT). The user must provide an Execution Layer (EL) address to receive BTC on Strata.

The withdrawal request is assigned to an operator who fulfills the request by creating a transaction spending BTC from the bridge address to the user's specified withdrawal address. Once the other N-1 operators co-sign this transaction it is broadcast to bitcoin for confirmation.

Note

Deposits and withdrawals are allowed in a denomination of \(D\) BTC where \(D = 10 \ \text{BTC}\) is a value predefined by the bridge federation.

Info

All the multisigs in the deposit and withdrawal flows follow the MuSig2 protocol, where signatures are aggregated into a single signature that validates all \(N\) participants' partial signatures.

Deposit

The deposit process is initiated by the user, who sends 101 BTC to a P2TR address, where:

  1. The key path spend is unspendable, following BIP 341 with a "NUMS"2 point added to the random scalar \(r = \text{0x82758434e13488368e0781c4a94019d3d6722f854d26c15d2d157acd1f464723}\).

  2. The script path spend has two paths:

  3. "Deposit path", an \(N\)-of-\(N\) multisig path, where \(N\) is the number of operators in the bridge.
  4. "Take back" path, which allows the user to take back their funds if the bridge fails to move funds from the Deposit Request Transaction (DRT) into the bridge address within a two-week period, i.e. it is time-locked and the user provides a signature to spend it.

This transaction has some metadata attached to it, in the form of an OP_RETURN output, that can be up to 80 bytes long (according to bitcoin standardness policy), and is composed of the following data:

  1. Magic bytes. These take \(11\) bytes and are used to identify the bridge.
  2. "Take back" TapLeaf hash. These take \(32\) bytes and are used to validate the Deposit Request Transaction (DRT), while also necessary for the control block required to spend the P2TR output via the \(N\)-of-\(N\) Tapscript.
  3. Execution Layer (EL) address. The Execution Layer (EL) address is the Strata address where the user wants to receive the BTC in Strata. It is a 20-byte Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) address. This is \(20\) bytes long.

The bridge monitors the blockchain for incoming transactions, which can be detected by the OP_RETURN output. Once the bridge detects the Deposit Request Transaction (DRT), it verifies the "take back" TapLeaf hash, the multisig pubkey path, and the full Taproot commitment.

If the Deposit Request Transaction (DRT) is valid, the bridge operators fulfill the deposit with a Deposit Transaction (DT) that transfers the BTC to the bridge address's UTXO set and also mints the same amount of BTC to the Execution Layer (EL) address provided by the user.

Below in the figure is the deposit flow:

sequenceDiagram
    participant User
    participant Bitcoin
    participant Bridge

    User->>Bitcoin: DRT
    Bitcoin->>Bitcoin: DRT
    Bitcoin->>Bridge: DRT
    Bridge->>Bridge: DRT
    Bridge->>Bitcoin: DRT-DT
    Bitcoin->>Bitcoin: DT
    Bridge->>Bridge: Mint

Withdrawal

The user requests a withdrawal on Strata and an operator is assigned to fulfill the request on bitcoin:

  1. The user requests a withdrawal making sure to burn the same amount of BTC on Strata.
  2. The assigned operator creates and signs a Withdrawal Transaction (WT) where they spend 10 BTC from the bridge address' UTXO set, while subtracting the operator's fee and the mining fee, and requests the other \(N−1\) operators to sign the Withdrawal Transaction.
  3. Once all the signatures have been aggregated, the transaction is submitted to bitcoin.
  4. Once the transaction is confirmed, the withdrawal request is fulfilled.

The withdrawal flow is shown below:

sequenceDiagram
    participant User
    participant Operator
    participant Bridge
    participant Bitcoin

    User->>User: Burn
    User->>Bridge: Withdrawal
    Bridge->>Operator: Duty
    Operator->>Bitcoin: WT
    Operator->>Operator: WT
    Bitcoin->>Bitcoin: WT

  1. The user must pay the bitcoin network fees for both the Deposit Request and Deposit Transactions. ↩

  2. "Nothing Up My Sleeve" (NUMS) point, i.e., a point with unknown discrete logarithm, constructed by taking the hash of the standard uncompressed encoding of the secp256k1 base point \(G\) as \(X\) coordinate, as per BIP 341. An unspendable pubkey is a point on the curve whose discrete log is not known with respect to the generator point \(G\). This can be verified by revealing the random scalar \(r\) used to generate the pubkey by shifting the NUMS point. ↩