“Anything worth doing is worth doing right.”
— attributed to Hunter S. Thompson
2025 was a defining year in Alpen’s journey to become Bitcoin’s financial system. We released test versions of the platform, published groundbreaking research, Alpen pilled industry-leading partners into our vision, and so much more.
In the first edition of our 2026 newsletter, we recap the milestones and announcements from the past year.
In 2025, we announced the most “macho” stablecoin possible: a Bitcoin-backed + Bitcoin-settled dollar built with Liquity Protocol. The Bitcoin Dollar (BTD) offers a middle path between holding BTC and transacting in stable money, without centralized custody, governance, or a speculative token. It’s over-collateralized, immutable after deployment, and designed to be simple: deposit BTC, set your interest rate, mint BTD.
Watch David’s whiteboard explainer.
Bitcoin won monetary sovereignty. But privacy, finance, and scale will have to be layered in, and no single layer will solve it all. In 2025, we unveiled the Strata vision: let a thousand Bitcoin layers bloom, starting with Alpen and Starknet. Strata exists to close Bitcoin’s functionality gaps by enabling specialized infrastructure—while staying neutral and outside the control of any single entity. A layer to enable all other layers.
Read more about the Strata vision.
This year, we launched two public Alpen testnets—Shanghai and Prague—bringing us much closer to our final mainnet rollup design with the most secure programmable BTC. In 2025, we publicly demonstrated (twice) what finance on Bitcoin looks like. Two testnets, one grand genAI promo film, and a clear message: 2026 is the year Bitcoin’s financial system becomes a reality.
Watch the Starship film again.
2025 was the year Glock went from a lab concept to a near production-ready codebase. We published the paper, co-developed the codebase, and initiated audits. Glock delivers orders-of-magnitude efficiency gains over BitVM and brings Ethereum-like optimistic verification to Bitcoin. Soon, Glock will secure BTC deposits to Alpen—so users can securely “use” their Bitcoin. Next frontier: permissionless challenging.
Watch David’s whiteboard explainer.
Join the Glock interest group.
Secure Bitcoin finance isn’t just an industry narrative—it’s a national strategic concern. This year, the White House cited Alpen as a notable Bitcoin innovation in 2024, during a period when “Bitcoin was on the ballot” in the U.S. It’s a signal that Bitcoin-native financial infrastructure is entering the mainstream policy conversation.
One of 2025’s biggest cross-ecosystem debates put the core question on the table: does tech feature superiority win, or does the asset the world demands win? Ethereum Foundation’s Justin Drake argued that Bitcoin’s slower pace of innovation will never catch up to Ethereum’s technological dominance. Alpen Labs’ John Light argued that feature advantage won’t matter if the asset the world demands is BTC, not ETH. Hosted by House of ZK, this debate revisited this massive fault line in our industry.
In 2025, we started auditing Alpen and Strata with world-class infrastructure audit firms that have audited protocols securing billions in onchain finance. We completed Halbourne and Least Authority audits for two Strata components: the Orchestration Layer and the Secret Service. We also began a long-term collaboration with Zellic to audit Glock, Alpen, and the remaining Strata components, including Glock’s new Groth16-based verifier.
We started 2025 with Jon Charbonneau’s thesis laying out the case for Alpen & Strata as Bitcoin’s execution layer. The argument is straightforward: the top Bitcoin L2 unlocks one of the largest markets in crypto, Bitcoin L2s target a larger market than Ethereum L2s, and security matters more when the asset is BTC. Demand for Bitcoin-backed loans, trading, and yield is massive—and the execution layer that stays most permissionless, self-custodial, and credibly neutral will capture the lion’s share.
This year, Bitcoin makes the leap.
BTC no longer has to sit idle for you to retain ownership. You can use your bitcoin—lend it, borrow against it, earn interest on it—without handing it over to a custodian. Hold → Use is a simple shift, and a profound one. It changes how deeply Bitcoin can integrate into the world as an asset.
We’re excited for what comes next and glad you’re here for it.
© 2025 Alpen Labs. All rights reserved.
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