Improving the federated 2-way peg: A new sidechain design for trustless bridges on Ethereum
Duration: 00:12:09
Speaker: Matt Luongo
Type: Talk
Expertise: Intermediate
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
In this talk, we'll introduce a novel mechanism to maintain 2-way pegs, as well an initial implementation of a Bitcoin peg on Ethereum. ## Problem Bitcoin's stable codebase is a strength. Developers are loathe to introduce significant changes, reasoning that a store of value should prioritize stable operation. While this cemented Bitcoin's place in the market, we all know the costs- Bitcoin's ossification at the expense of public experimentation and diverse use cases. In 2014, the answer to this problem was "sidechains". Trustless sidechains are the ultimate vaporware- and since 2014 the goalposts have moved. ## Approaches Blockstream's Liquid touted itself as the "first production sidechain", built on a multi-sig federation. No hashpower validates the sidechain-- funds are fully trusted to 15 Bitcoin multi-sig participants. BitGo's WBTC takes a similar tact-- but instead of building a new chain, custodians operate on Ethereum. Neat! Unfortunately, they require KYC :( These centralized projects have a few custodians that can be convinced by governments-- or their own interests-- to censor or seize funds. ## Design We propose a new approach-- the *bonded, multi-federated peg*. We believe this is the best candidate for a sufficiently trust-minimized alternative, unlocking Bitcoin for use in DeFi.
