Bitcoin aims to be a censorship-resistant currency for humanity. However, Bitcoin’s Script—a simple, stack based programming language—makes it very difficult to build arbitrarily complex financial and other censorship-resistant applications at Layer 1. 

Attempts have been made in the past to replace Bitcoin as the leading form of uncensorable digital money, using Turing-complete languages that are more programmable—but all of them turned out to be much less secure and decentralized. To date, none have come close to replicating Bitcoin’s monetary properties, its history of decentralization, its immutability, or its security properties.

*DEX: Decentralized exchanges

So, we arrive at a dilemma. We have one of the most popular digital money that is difficult to build on, and there are inferior protocols that are easy to build financial applications on.

Portal is building DeFi and other layers on Bitcoin

Portal solves the problem by building financial functionality on Bitcoin in many layers, instead of the base layer itself. This means that Bitcoin protocol does not need to be upgraded to achieve any new functionality.

Moreover, the failure of any of the layers is deprecated at that layer—but the advantages of added functionality will ripple back to the base layer. This can increase Bitcoin adoption, its security budget, and its usability as the truly global monetary system.

Built with Fabric
Secure trade execution for digital markets

Fabric* provides cryptographically-secure infrastructure for running information markets, smart contracts, and secure multi-party computations.

*Fabric is an open-source protocol and set of technologies.

An atomic swap-based
DeFi network

Portal Network:
Our first product

Portal network is a non-custodial, peer-to-peer, cross-chain network that is fast and cheap. The ideal peer-to-peer cross-chain network should replicate the user experience of centralized exchanges—while being completely non-custodial, permission-less, and secure. 

Portal brings real DeFi to your wallet

Safety of trading tokens natively
+
Speed & liquidity of centralized exchanges

Game changer for peer to peer trade

Portal is different from current DeFi applications that use “wrapped Bitcoins”, which are just IOUs from unknown parties—because Portal operates on native Bitcoin. Also, unlike “bridges”, which are hard to secure and reason about, Portal uses “unbroadcast” transactions to facilitate fast and cheap exchange among peers.

Unlike several previous and current attempts at atomic swaps, Portal’s layer 2 system moves the peer to peer scheme to an incentivized third party scheme. This facilitates and intermediates markets, while not being in control or custody of cryptocurrency flows.

In Portal, each “peer” or user holds the private keys, validates and verifies unbroadcast transaction requests, and is incentivized to only propagate the correct requests to the rest of the network. The facilitators on the other hand are incentivized to intermediate as many peer to peer transactions as they can.

Portal architecture makes it possible for facilitators to enable compliance modules that allow them to comply with applicable KYC, FATF and other applicable laws and regulations, while preserving user privacy, custody and control.

Strategic partnerships

Portal has built relationships with some of the largest blockchain solution providers—and is expanding its footprint with major exchanges, miners, and others who play a significant role in increasing network adoption.

Building a decentralized web using the Portal network model

Portal’s atomic swap-based DeFi network is our first product, and serves as the blueprint for building other censorship-resistant layers. The same “Fee Market for Services” model can be expanded to include a decentralized, censorship-resistant network for storing and fetching data.

Moreover, for the first time, decentralized two-sided marketplaces can be built without the need for intermediaries hosting and being in control of user-generated data. With Portal’s atomic swap model, the marketplace participants who consume and create/store data—and who drive the value of the marketplace—can share in the network externalities they themselves helped create.

Portal empowers developers to build layered applications on top of Bitcoin using Fabric Protocol. Portal DeFi layer directly benefits from all of these layered assets because they can all be swapped to and from native Bitcoin via Portal, which drives liquidity. 

Avoiding the pitfalls

of bridged, "wrapped" BTC, and Layer 1 solutions

Currently, there are some solutions that claim to interoperate with Bitcoin using bridges secured by federations (a sidechain in the case of Rootstock/RSK, and Thorchain), and others that utilize “wrapped” Bitcoins which are IOUs issued by unknown third parties (RenBTC, WBTC). Neither of these approaches have proven to approximate the security of native BTC, and have had severe security events that lead to a loss of client funds (ex: Thorchain’s chaosnet exploit). 

Portal’s approach to building DeFi on native Bitcoin avoids all the above problems, and brings it closer to a Layer 2 system—similar to the lightning network, which does not inherit any of the above security issues or wrapped and bridged assets.

In the decentralized data marketplace space, there are competitors such as Filecoin and Storj which are other Layer 1 blockchains. These projects have two problems: 

1. Replacing Bitcoin as a Layer 1 blockchain, and 
2. Finding product/protocol market fit

No blockchain asset has succeeded in coming even close to becoming a proto-money to rival Bitcoin to date, and we believe others are unlikely to do so. Portal’s advantage is that it uses Bitcoin as the contract fee mechanism, thereby leveraging the liquidity, depth and user base of Bitcoin to build this marketplace for decentralized data.

Portal exists at the intersection of two seminal trends

in finance and social media

In finance, the abuse of monetary sovereignty gave rise to Bitcoin. Bitcoin, as the uncensorable money of the future, has constraints in the number and types of applications it can support. These constraints exist because there are tradeoffs between decentralization and security on the one hand, and complexity and scalability on the other.

But increasing financial complexity is an essential feature of progress. The money layer of the future needs more applications, and should be able to support much more complexity. Portal allows many financial applications on top of Bitcoin without needing to change the underlying protocol. 

For comparison, the Defi space on Ethereum, Solana and other chains has a total volume locked of ~$220B*. Given that Bitcoin has the highest network value of all cryptocurrencies, the DeFi activity on Bitcoin can approach and even exceed many times the exchange trade volume of Bitcoin—which was around $12T over the last year. Given the fact that in equity markets, last year, the single option trade volume surpassed the underlying stock volume*, we expect similar dynamics to take place in Bitcoin.

Portal is building the decentralized network that helps bring the scalability and composability to this market.

The other big social trend Portal is positioned to build on is the rise of decentralized, censorship-resistant social media. Portal is building the primitives required for using Bitcoin as the financial rail for uncensorable human interactions.

We believe many more markets for censorship-resistant ownership of data, computation, and other assets can be built on Bitcoin. To estimate the size of these markets: the global social networking platforms market was over $192B, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 25.38%, to over $939B by 2026. 

Currently, decentralized social media is <0.1% of this market. We expect that to dramatically change in the coming years.

Our mission:
Make DeFi on Bitcoin unstoppable

Our vision is to build censorship resistant, decentralized markets on top of Bitcoin in many layers. In keeping with the ethos of Bitcoin, Portal serves as the exchange layer to swap all these layered assets to and from Bitcoin. Portal is the first layer that also connects the many other layered assets to Bitcoin and to other blockchains.

Product, growth, & deep crypto expertise

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