Torben Poguntke

@BitcoinNews @F_Gregaard @Cardano_CF @_dsencil @ParisBlockWeek Both are UTxO chains, not a one-way street. A bridge with the trust anchor on Bitcoin and redemption enforced by Bitcoin consensus isn't a federated wrapper. Bitcoin DeFi anchored on Bitcoin with the functional layer elsewhere doesn't quietly turn into a custodial story.

Satoshis as gas fees on Cardano. That's where @F_Gregaard, CEO of the @Cardano_CF Cardano Foundation, starts his conversation with @_dsencil at @ParisBlockWeek. Bitcoin + Cardano, quantum, AI agents, and why BMW and Lufthansa are on chain.

The question is what it takes to build. Not as a whitepaper claim. As a deployed system: economics hold at scale, security is proven, dishonest behavior by any party doesn't break the guarantee for everyone else. For a long time, that was considered impossible. It isn't anymore.

"Trust-minimized" gets used loosely. The strict reading is narrow. A bridge whose security reduces to Bitcoin's own security plus the cryptographic assumptions of the primitives in the construction. Nothing else. Not a custodian, not a committee, not a threshold.

A user holding wrapped Bitcoin is trusting a custodian. A user bridging through a federation is trusting a threshold of signers. A user relying on a multisig is trusting a committee. Every major path for bringing Bitcoin into DeFi today asks the user to trust someone.

"Pogun bundles a non-margin credit market, yield infrastructure, and a trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge" - @jamieCrypto, News Lead at Bitcoin.com

The harder path: verifying claims on Bitcoin itself, using Bitcoin's own guarantees, without asking it to become something it isn't.

Custodial wrapping exists, and for some users it's fine. Institutional capital and anyone who values Bitcoin's properties at scale won't hold through a custodian. The counterparty exposure cancels the reason to hold Bitcoin in the first place.

A credit market is only as valuable as the collateral behind it. The execution layer (isolated positions, deterministic settlement, transferable debt) is where the design arguments have been made. The constraint that remains is the asset base.

@BeRewt @ItsDave_ADA @__fallen_icarus @AThrouvalas @pogun_io For those who don't want to search: youtu.be/j6h4_mBs_3E?t=…

@ItsDave_ADA @__fallen_icarus @AThrouvalas @pogun_io @blocksmithy There's also a rare evo shooting of Torben explaining the details of the bridge.

IOG's subunit @pogun_io just pitched a ~$3M treasury withdrawal to fund its end-to-end Bitcoin DeFi solution on Cardano. 🧵 It includes a credit facility, a yield app, and a Bitcoin bridge. There's much to like, but also much to improve to make this really deliver for the ecosystem. My thoughts... 1) The P2P credit facility is the single best part. Bitcoiners fundamentally want to borrow/earn on their BTC without selling it. This product would let them do so WITHOUT getting a margin call due to short-term volatility. That's just the sort of unique, killer app that Bitcoiners would love and which would drive liquidity to Cardano. I HODL BTC myself, and I'm telling you I'd use this. (credit @__fallen_icarus). 2) The yield app I am mixed on. I like the concept: to make providing USD (stablecoin) liquidity to the loan book seamless and easy, to boost capital efficiency. But we lack details on how exactly that works on-chain and where the tradeoffs lie. We need a more concrete plan here, as it's the most challenging part of this product. Fundamentally, liquidity provision is more complicated here than on a traditional lending pool app, because lending is not "risk-free." So you need a way to abstract away the complexity as much as possible while still providing optionality to stablecoin lenders so they can choose their risk profile. 3) Leave out the BitVM bridge. Integrate alternatives. It will be an inefficient use of time and treasury money to try building the BitVM-based 1-of-N optimistic style bridge that we hoped for since 2023. BitVM turned out to be way harder to build on than anyone thought. So many projects (including my old one!) promised to build one in this cycle. They didn't. I recently spoke to an expert on Bitcoin L2s / bridges who informed me that NONE of the BitVM bridge projects have been delivered except one - and even that one is on training wheels and is really a 3-of-5 assumption. We should get back to basics here. A sufficiently decentralized honest majority bridge with the right incentives in place works, is close to impossible to hack, and can be shipped extremely soon. We have eBTC at @CharmsDev which is on Cardano *right now," with UI for everyone to start sending their BTC to Cardano to be ready in a few days. Not just us either - @FluidTokens already has fBTC on testnet, and that's quite a compelling bridge solution as well. I think the Cardano community is very well connected and will have a remarkable ability to coordinate our efforts if we try. Pogun is an initiative that several projects building at the Cardano X Bitcoin intersection can rally around. Teamwork is the best answer to really make this pop and get it shipped on time. But that's just my 2 sats. 🟠

@ItsDave_ADA @BeRewt @__fallen_icarus @AThrouvalas @pogun_io Bridge verification has evolved significantly beyond Cardinal. More on the technical direction soon.

There’s been a lot of discussion around this for quite some time, which is why there’s some confusion from myself and my delegators. From the outside, it’s not clear what has actually been built versus what is still conceptual. Can you point to anything tangible that exists today for Pogun specifically? For example repositories, code, test deployments, or working components beyond the Cardinal specification. I’m trying to understand whether this is funding ongoing development of an already close to active system, or if most of the work to date has been focused on preparing the treasury proposal itself.

@ItsDave_ADA @BeRewt @__fallen_icarus @AThrouvalas @pogun_io The credit market is one part of a larger stack including a yield layer and a trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge. A bridge alone doesn't solve the problem. The credit infrastructure is what makes bridged BTC useful.

@ItsDave_ADA @BeRewt @__fallen_icarus @AThrouvalas @pogun_io Fair question. Credit market smart contracts are in formal security audit with TxPipe right now. Mainnet target is June. Milestones and gated disbursement criteria are in the treasury proposal.

A tradeable debt instrument changes the lifecycle of a loan. It stops being a position someone is locked into and becomes an asset that flows through the market like any other.

This is how bonds work. Buy one, hold it, sell it. The issuer doesn't care. The terms are the terms. The secondary market handles the rest. DeFi has nothing like this. Not yet.

You can trade every token, every derivative, every synthetic asset on-chain. You can't trade a specific loan. Pool-based lending doesn't produce individual instruments. Your deposit is a share of a pool. There's nothing discrete to own, so there's nothing to transfer.

Let's make Pogun happen. #Cardano #Defi