The first steps towards Interlay and Interlay were made when the XCLAIM paper was presented at the Scaling Bitcoin in 2018 – describing the first-ever protocol to move cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to Ethereum in an economically trustless and decentralized manner. In 2020, the two founded Interlay to bring research into practice. Today, Interlay employs 23 staff, including developers with experience at Google, Morgan Stanley, Trivago, Accenture, PwC, Worldpay, and Atlassian.
Interlay is a modular, programmable layer situated between Bitcoin and the multichain ecosystem. It is the only Bitcoin-centric layer 1 that is decentralized across the entire stack: from trustless BTC bridge to BTC DeFi hub
Leveraging BTC as the main reserve asset and source of liquidity, Interlay’s stack provides a set of custody and bridge tools that allow applications to tailor asset management to their specific use case. Structured as a marketplace, Interlay already supports collateralized bridges, and will add threshold shared custody (incl. institutions and 3rd party providers), as well as discrete log contracts (DLCs), and zero-knowledge contingent payments (ZKCPs). To enhance security and user experience, Interlay will incorporate social sign-in options like Google-sign in and opt-in recovery mechanisms via federation counter-signing and identity verification.
Interlay is launching both EVM (for compatibility) and Rust smart contracts that are optimal for BTC-centric development (compatible with widely adopted Bitcoin-core libraries and tooling). Thereby, builders can seamlessly access built-in DeFi tooling (AMM and lending) and assets from other ecosystems, including stablecoins and blue-chip L1 assets. This puts Interlay in a unique position to help improve upon the rather centralized BTC stack (Lightning nodes, Nostr servers, indexers, CEXes) with decentralized custody and smart contracts.
