About

A decade of sidechains and Layer-2 solutions have attempted to make Bitcoin faster, cheaper and more extensible by moving activity off-chain, trying to run the Ethereum playbook on the Bitcoin blockchain. But Bitcoin isn't Ethereum, and so those efforts have failed ignominiously.

The Kontor development team has been pushing the Bitcoin ecosystem forward for over a decade, having previously created the Counterparty Bitcoin metaprotocol—Counterparty included world’s first blockchain-based decentralized exchange, oracles and prediction markets, trustless gaming and financial derivatives. It is also the platform on which some of the earliest NFT collections launched, including Spells of Genesis and Rare Pepes.

The success of other metaprotocols since the release of Counterparty—Ordinals, Runes, BRC-20, Alkanes—proves that users want richer functionality on Bitcoin, but that it needs to be on-chain first and foremost. While sidechains and Layer-2s parasitize Bitcoin by siphoning economic activity and transaction fees away from Bitcoin, metaprotocols strengthen it by increasing on-chain activity and miner revenue. They also offer much deeper compatibility with Bitcoin itself, working directly with native Bitcoin infrastructure and preserving the Bitcoin security model rather than compromising it in the name of a techno-utopian future.

Kontor represents a new approach that matches Bitcoin's original values: a metaprotocol that extends Bitcoin's capabilities on-chain with modern technology. Kontor offers rich smart contracts and scalable file storage that can be purchased with Bitcoin in a single confirmation; a native gas token that complements rather than competes with Bitcoin, which remains the network's unit of account and store of value. Kontor doesn't try to change Bitcoin into something it isn't; it builds on top of Bitcoin to realize Bitcoin's own potential as the foundation for a future of decentralized finance and value creation.