FAQ

tBTC does not maintain the peg. It’s a supply peg not a price peg, so there is no algorithmic mechanism needed to function as a decentralized peg.

tBTC is not a price peg to BTC; it’s a supply peg. That means BTC/tBTC might not be exactly the same. tBTC might trade at a slight premium or a discount.

This technology is new and it’s impossible to anticipate every situation where something could go wrong. That being said, there are several situations the community has identified and taken careful measures to address. For more information, please look at the tBTC Security Model page.

Not yet. Integration work is required to build tBTC minting and redemption into a dApp. The developer documentation includes links to the tBTC SDK and SDK docs, enabling developers to build interfaces that match their products. To validate Bitcoin transactions, the best approach is to run an electrum server, which is very easy to spin up.

tBTC has undergone multiple audits (3 for v1, 3 and counting for v2), as have the underlying node clients, and tBTC is a part of the Threshold Network bug bounty program. You can view v2 audits on this page. Additionally, Threshold has a bug bounty program on Immunefi for ongoing security work.

Each user should undertake their own analysis as to whether there are any legal restrictions in their jurisdiction that would either prevent them from using tBTC or require the user to register with certain government entities.

Please check with a tax professional to determine whether depositing BTC for tBTC is a taxable event in a given jurisdiction.

tBTC’s signer sets use threshold ECDSA as a Bitcoin multisig replacement. For every deposit, a new signer set is pulled together (selected by the random beacon), and they generate a Bitcoin PKH address for the depositor, which is marked on the Ethereum chain.

Anyone who holds at least 40,000 T tokens can stake them and authorize the tBTC Threshold application to become a signer for tBTC. Currently, the Threshold Council manages authorizing new operators to participate in tBTC protocol operations to ensure system performance while adjustments are made to allow operations by anyone who can run a node. More details about staking T tokens and the Threshold Network are available in the Threshold Network documentation.

Some people believe tBTC is better for several reasons. Some projects have built synthetic price pegs, which is not a true bridge. Other projects are supply pegs, but have centralized parties adding friction to the minting and redemption process and therefore, are not censorship-resistant systems. Some new bridges are decentralized supply pegs, however, those security models are less safe. They rely on a ⅔ honesty assumption, use brand new “roll your own crypto” rather than peer-reviewed, widely deployed t-ECDSA cryptography), or use an outdated capital-inefficient approach that tBTC has already outgrown in v2 of the protocol.

No.

The team behind tBTC is building a supply peg, not a price peg. It’s not a synthetic mechanism. For bitcoin holders, it shouldn’t matter what the actual price is, it just matters that you can redeem it for 1 BTC