@jasonmyersart @ord_io @kontornetwork It's very much a proof of concept. "How Dan we build Bitcoin but for storage?" It's missing key features such as penalties for not storing data you promise to store.
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Adam Krellenstein
1.2K posts
Adam Krellenstein
@agkrellenstein
Lead maintainer @CounterpartyXCP and @KontorNetwork; natural philosophy
Katılım Mayıs 2017
295 Takip Edilen2.2K Takipçiler
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
Kontor offers a scalable perpetual file storage system that runs directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, incentivized by KOR emissions.
You can find out more here: kontor.network/learn/file-sto…
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
Kontor achieves 1–2 second confirmations and over 1,000 TPS through optimistic consensus and transaction encoding optimizations, all while relying entirely on Bitcoin for finality.
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
@CounterpartyXCP is going to remain a staple of NFT history far into the future.
New upgrade proposals talk w/ @agkrellenstein this this Sunday afternoon 1pm Pacific.
Study up, state your case or just listen in.
Slick new wallet from @droplister (XCP Wallet) - most features included in a wallet so far!!
New projects? - Rare PenPen Agency, Rare Horses?
x.com/i/spaces/1qGvv…
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
@blockamoto @isabelfoxenduke Yeah, we've considered a bunch of variants! The issue with that model is that the "recipient" of a smart contract function call isn't always (usually) obvious. There's a full spec up at docs.kontor.network, and it'll continue to evolve until we hit mainnet.
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@isabelfoxenduke @agkrellenstein The fee prediction market concept is wild.
@agkrellenstein have you considered having the stake of failed outcomes sent to the recipients of the predicted transactions instead of burned?
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
BITCOIN RAILS #51: HISTORY OF METAPROTOCOLS ON BITCOIN I with Counterparty Creator @agkrellenstein
🔗 YOUTUBE: youtu.be/vOUubNr3Q44
🌿 SPOTIFY: open.spotify.com/episode/3scwcA…
Metaprotocols on Bitcoin have a long and complex history—stretching far before the launch of Ordinals, the most widely used metaprotocol in Bitcoin’s history.
Ordinals’ creator @rodarmor credits much of his inspiration to these early projects—including Yoni Assia’s Colored Coins, @ErikVoorhees Satoshi Dice, and of course, @CounterpartyXCP (widely considered the first NFT protocol) developed by Evan Wagner and Adam Krellenstein.
While CounterParty was not originally intended for the use of on-chain art, its use for art developed a cult following—used by projects like RarePepes, which remain some of the most valuable NFTs on the market. cc @ScrillaVentura @theog__
In this interview, I sit down with Krellenstein to review the full history of metaprotocols on Bitcoin—the complex history of the first NFT protocol in history—and why, after a long hiatus from Bitcoin, Krellenstein is back in action with metaprotocol @kontornetwork ...with the aim of giving all Layer 2s a run for their money.
In this episode, Adam and I cover:
- Why early Bitcoin metaprotocols (pre-Ethereum) didn’t take off for DeFi—and what's different today
- His personal experiences with @LukeDashjr and the early “spam wars” of 2014
- Why Adam left the Bitcoin space for 8+ years after the creation of Counterparty, and is making a dramatic return with @kontornetwork this past year
- The rise of Pepes—and the pros and cons of frogs in pushing forward DeFi metaprotocols
- How Kontor is solving the 10-minute block time issue
- Why metaprotocols will ultimately outperform Layer 2s for Bitcoin DeFI 🌶️🌶️
This episode of Bitcoin Rails is powered by:
— Best In Slot (@bestinslotxyz) - the leading API for Ordinals and BRC-20 data aggregation and indexing.
— Spark (@lightspark) - a statechains implementation advancing Bitcoin-powered payments.
— Citrea (@citrea_xyz) - a leading Bitcoin rollup technology and BitVM alliance contributor.
📌 TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
00:25 How Adam Got Into Bitcoin
03:06 Counterparty: Bitcoin’s First Smart-Contract Meta-Protocol
05:01 History of Mastercoin, Smart Contracts & Counterparty
11:12 Why Adam Built Counterparty
14:02 Early Days of NFTs Projects
17:28 Counterparty’s Pivotal Role in Bitcoin’s History
26:23 Proof-of-Burn and Why XCP Exists
33:50 DAO Hack Reversal & Why Bitcoin’s Ethos Still Wins
36:01 NFTs on Counterparty: Rare Pepes & Community Adoption
38:50 How Ordinals Brought Adam Back Intro Bitcoin
43:25 Counterparty in 2024: Governance, Code Decay & Community Rescue
48:09 The Future of Counterparty
50:43 Kontor: Bitcoin’s Next Gen Metra-Protocol
01:02:46 L2 vs Meta-Protocols
01:04:03 Optimistic Verification & BLS Signatures
01:07:38 WASM vs EVM on Bitcoin: Performance & Ecosystem Design
01:15:16 Bitcoin-Secured File Storage: ZK Proofs & the Roadmap Ahead
YouTube
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@isabelfoxenduke Damn I'm so glad to have had the opportunity to discuss all of these topics that are close to my heart 🫶
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
Counterparty is easily one of the most influential crypto protocol designs — and not just metaprotocol designs — in Bitcoin's history.
Arguably the first true “smart contract” system on the market (and this was pre-Ethereum), there are few people on the planet more qualified to share the history of metaprotocols on Bitcoin than Counterparty’s primary architect and creator, @agkrellenstein.
We sat down to cover the history of metaprotocols all the way back to Hal Finney [see vid below]. Interview out tomorrow. Drop a follow so you don’t miss it 🔥
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
1 sat/vB
During the Blocksize Wars, many believed Bitcoin faced an imminent scalability crisis.
A decade later, transaction fees remain low and bandwidth is abundant.
A reminder that markets and innovation often resolve challenges more effectively than urgency or intervention.
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
HOT TAKE
The only pure cryptoart chain that exists is counterparty
There’s zero digital art on there - only cryptoart
… it’s the longest running cryptoart chain- since 2014
…it has no weird Epstein billionaire investors like the other chains do
And MOST IMPORTANTLY it was created the opposite of every other chain - it was an ICO that u had to burn btc to receive Xcp - yes even the mfing founder had to destroy btc to get his cut of Xcp- instead of asking ppl for hundreds of millions and keeping 70% of the coins in yer “marketing and treasury” fund - it was a way to show and prove and put yer money where yer mouth is while also making bitcoin rarer for the mfing maxi camp
Yer favorite art chain is ran by money printoooors - the opposite of based
Xcp is ran by poors and blue collar devs and occupied by self taught artists
Do the math 1+ 1 = 21
Art from 2018 by @joeychips 👇
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
Version 0.1 of XCP Wallet (soft launched)
chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcp-wal…
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
Bridging the Bitcoin Divide:
Introducing Kontor Asset Signature Trusts
Kontor solves Bitcoin ecosystem fragmentation by wrapping arbitrary UTXOs into programmable receipt tokens via a FROST-secured Taproot vault, making any metaprotocol asset usable in Kontor smart contracts.
Article link below 👇
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@agkrellenstein Yep. Read about it how it works at docs.kontor.network
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@kontornetwork is going to scale Bitcoin without any L2. One-second confirmations. >1000 TPS.
vitalik.eth@VitalikButerin
There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts: * L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected * L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026 Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path. First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum. This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead. We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs. What would I do today if I were an L2? * Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features * Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets * Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?) From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug. The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately). This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: ethresear.ch/t/combining-pr… and ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-… ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add. This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
12 years ago today, a group of developers sent 2,130 Bitcoin to an unspendable address. This was no accident. Here is the story of Counterparty.
Art by @bettidlomas
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Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
Adam Krellenstein retweetledi
By utilizing BLS signatures, Kontor condenses multiple transactions into a single compact signature, making meta-protocol transactions up to 100× smaller than standard Bitcoin transactions and significantly increasing network throughput.
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