Our latest paper introduces the Transfer of Ownership Protocol (TOOP)—a significant advancement in the security
of trust minimizing transfer protocol for assets originating on Bitcoin into other blockchains.
TOOP addresses a long-standing limitation in existing BitVM-like protocols: the restriction that bridged assets can
only be unlocked by addresses known and registered during the original locking phase. This constraint has led to
bridge designs dominated by the front-and-reimburse model which impose additional financial costs. In addition,
non-fungible asset wrapping was not possible without undermining the integrity of the security assumptions.
TOOP eliminates this inefficiency, allowing the assets to be directly transferred to the intended recipients,
completely avoiding any fronting requirements at all. This also enables handling ordinals and other non-fungible
tokens without sacrificing security.
This innovation isn’t just theoretical. TOOP has already been introduced in Cardinal, a protocol designed with Input Output based on BitVMX to wrap Bitcoin UTXOs into the Cardano ecosystem, turning Bitcoin Ordinals into Cardano NFTs. This marks a major milestone in improving the security of bridging Bitcoin and Cardano in an efficient and scalable way.
Read the full paper here.
