We're thrilled to announce that Alpen’s Public Testnet is now live! After months of tireless building, we're excited to share this preview of Bitcoin's financial system with you. We made a short film to celebrate this moment, and we hope you’ll enjoy it.
Today, Bitcoin’s market cap sits well above $2 trillion, but its participation in finance remains limited to opaque centralized services that require owners to give up custody. Alpen’s Public Testnet is a major step toward bringing Bitcoin’s financial system online. This milestone brings major financial apps like trading, borrowing, earning, stablecoins, and more one step closer to Bitcoin.
As a milestone, testnet is analogous to reaching base camp when summiting a towering mountain. A base camp provides the staging area at the base of a mountain from where climbers prepare for their ascent to the summit. Testnet provides Alpen Labs, contributors, and the ecosystem a base to collaboratively prepare for the final sections of the ascent to mainnet.
“Bitcoin’s not just for holding anymore. Alpen is enabling Bitcoin holders to securely participate in Bitcoin finance in all the ways they’ve wanted, without the middlemen. We’re bringing together some of the best teams in the space to create a vibrant financial ecosystem for BTC.”
– Simanta Gautam, CEO and co-founder of Alpen Labs
Testnet enables developers to experiment, build, and test BTC applications that were previously confined to centralized exchanges, custodians, or wrapped tokens outside Bitcoin. Alpen's EVM-compatible environment enables the industry’s largest ecosystem of developers to tap into the EVM’s existing infrastructure when building on Bitcoin. To start using testnet, head over to our testnet docs and follow the instructions on connecting to the network. There, you’ll find much more on how Alpen works under the hood.
Testnet features our first 1-of-N Bitcoin verifier in a production environment. Alpen’s testnet verifier, whose design is inspired by BitVM2, is now a living example of the possibility of optimistic verification on Bitcoin. Work is already underway on a new verifier we recently invented called Glock (short for garbled lock). Glock is an optimistic verifier that’s up to 1000x more efficient and far simpler in design. We’re planning to bring Glock to Alpen in a subsequent testnet release before we launch the system to mainnet.
Both of these breakthroughs in Bitcoin verifiers, BitVM and Glock, have come in part from our heads-down research efforts to build optimistic verifiers for ZK proofs, which, as the term suggests, can optimistically verify ZK proofs on Bitcoin. Alpen’s ZK proofs are generated by Succinct’s Prover Network.
We'll be sunsetting devnet in two weeks as we migrate developers to testnet. We invite developers from the devnet community to join our community squares on Telegram and Discord to build together with the community.
Note that the public testnet launching today will be a short-lived network and will be fully replaced by the next testnet release in a few months. We plan for the next testnet to include upgradeability so that regenesis will no longer be required for subsequent testnet releases.
Money needs finance. For BTC to be an alternative to today's money, it must participate in finance. But to use BTC in finance today, we're forced to strip it of exactly what makes it special: ownership & transparency. Today's tokenized standards for BTC are closed: often controlled by a single entity and secured on another chain. We're building open, programmable rails for BTC that are secured by Bitcoin itself. Bitcoin needs its own financial system—one that's global, secure & accessible.
We've started building this new chapter in Bitcoin's story from around the world, spanning over a dozen cities from New York to Kathmandu. But to bring Bitcoin’s financial system to the world, we will need many more to join us in this struggle from every corner of the world: from app developers to Bitcoin & ZK missionaries.
Get started on testnet with our developer docs and give us your feedback on X, Discord, or Telegram!
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