Cardano Announces Partnership With BitcoinOS

In a major move towards blockchain innovation and interoperability, Cardano has announced a new partnership with BitcoinOS (BOS), a smart contract operating

Cardano (ADA) is making a major move towards blockchain innovation and interoperability with a new partnership announced on Thursday, October 24. The world’s fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization is joining forces with BitcoinOS (BOS), a smart contract operating system for Bitcoin (BTC).

This new alliance is aimed at unlocking Bitcoin’s trillion dollar liquidity for ADA investors and opening up new possibilities for cross-chain capabilities for Web3.

According to an official blog post by EMURGO, the founding entity of the Cardano blockchain, the partnership will begin by integrating BOS into Cardano’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem.

This will enable Cardano users and ADA investors to directly and securely utilize Bitcoin’s vast capital base in DeFi applications on Cardano.

The partnership will also introduce new cross-chain capabilities, enhancing the user experience, investor opportunities, project development, and trustless access to the Bitcoin ecosystem. Ultimately, this collaboration will support a more accessible and interconnected Web3 across multiple blockchains, driving further innovation and adoption of DeFi and other decentralized solutions.

The first technical milestone in this partnership will be the integration of the BOS Grail bridge into Cardano’s open-source blockchain ecosystem. The Grail bridge is a key technology that enables the secure and trustless bridging of Bitcoin and Bitcoin-based assets using BOS’ Zero Knowledge (ZK)-backed BitSNARK verification protocol.

BitSNARK is the first verification protocol to allow zk-SNARKS (Succinct Non-interactive Argument Knowledge) to run on Bitcoin with no changes to Bitcoin’s core protocol. Utilizing this groundbreaking approach with the Grail bridge will effectively allow Bitcoin liquidity to flow seamlessly into Cardano DeFi applications, offering enhanced interoperability and scalability.

This partnership marks a significant development for both Cardano and BitcoinOS. Cardano is the first Layer-1 blockchain to ever leverage BOS’s ZK-based solutions, positioning it as a crucial player in the DeFi ecosystem.

Through the integration of Bitcoin on Cardano, DeFi applications such as Fluid Tokens and the many other DeFi platforms on the Cardano blockchain will be able to enable their users to directly and easily interact with Bitcoin. This innovation will vastly expand its liquidity pool and attract more users and developers into its ecosystem, potentially leading to mass adoption of the blockchain.

Bitcoin itself also stands to benefit from the EMURGO and BOS partnership. As BOS enables more use cases by allowing ecosystems like Cardano to tap into Bitcoin’s liquidity through ZK proofs, Bitcoin, already the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, will become a more versatile asset, solidifying its role in the Web3 space.

"Our ZK-based solutions have continuously unlocked new scaling capabilities for Bitcoin, and now we are extending this benefit to other ecosystems beyond Bitcoin, enabling more growth in the industry," said Edam Yago, CEO of BitcoinOS.