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Cardinal Bridge Introduces Ownership-Preserving Withdrawals

A new research paper, “Cardinal: Bridging Bitcoin with Ownership Preservation,” introduces a trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge that guarantees users always withdraw the exact coins they deposited, a property multisig and prior BitVM-based bridges don’t provide. Cardinal extends the BitVM model through a generalized execution layer called ChainVM, and the paper shows how this framework can be instantiated using BitVMX.

eprint.iacr.org
🔗 Cardinal: Bridging Bitcoin with Ownership Preservation

Cross-chain bridges have emerged as key components of blockchain infrastructure, enabling digital assets to flow across chains and benefit from non-native features. While early bridge designs were fraught with brittle trust assumptions, more recent designs, even within Bitcoin's script limits, can operate in a trust-minimized setting.