Embedded Consensus

As a metaprotocol on Bitcoin, Kontor uses “embedded consensus”: metaprotocols derive state from an underlying blockchain without implementing their own consensus mechanism. Bitcoin miners order transactions and secure them with proof-of-work; Kontor indexers process those transactions according to additional rules. Because Bitcoin provides an immutable, timestamped log of all Kontor operations, and because Kontor’s execution rules are deterministic, every indexer processing the same Bitcoin history arrives at the same state.

Fast Confirmations

‍Kontor provides optimistic confirmation in 1–2 seconds. A network of KOR stakers runs BFT consensus to assign transaction ordering before Bitcoin confirmation. Each staker backs their signature with slashable collateral, creating economic finality proportional to the total stake at risk.                                

This works because stateful metaprotocols face a question that Bitcoin leaves unspecified: when multiple transactions in the same block modify shared state, which executes first? Rather than waiting for Bitcoin to decide, stakers reach agreement in advance. When the underlying Bitcoin transaction eventually confirms, execution proceeds at the pre-assigned position.

Recipients can calibrate their acceptance threshold based on transaction value. Small payments may accept minimal stake backing, while large transfers may require the full quorum (more than two-thirds of total stake). If stakers fail to reach consensus or go offline entirely, transactions still confirm on Bitcoin normally—the staker layer accelerates finality but never blocks it.

‍High Throughput‍

As a metaprotocol, Kontor inherits Bitcoin's block size limits. A naive implementation would max out at the same ~10 TPS as Bitcoin itself. Kontor reaches over 1,000 operations per second through aggressive optimization of how transactions are encoded.

The most significant optimization is trustless BLS signature aggregation. Vanilla Bitcoin signatures require 64 bytes per signer and cannot be combined across different keys. BLS signatures from any number of users compress into a single 48-byte aggregate. This allows bundlers—infrastructure providers who collect and publish transactions—to pack hundreds or thousands of operations into a single Bitcoin transaction, spreading the fixed overhead across the entire batch.

Additional space savings come from mapping long identifiers like public keys and contract addresses to compact 4-byte registry IDs (an 8–16× reduction), and compressing the final payload with Zstd. At batch sizes of 1,000 operations, Kontor achieves 65–93× improvement over vanilla Bitcoin transactions.

‍Low, Transparent Fees

‍Users pay two types of fees. The bundling fee compensates the bundler for Bitcoin block space—your share of the total transaction fee, split across all operations in the bundle. As batch sizes grow, per-operation costs drop proportionally. At 1,000 operations per bundle, each user pays roughly 1/1000th of the Bitcoin transaction fee.

The optional ordering fee is paid to stakers for fast confirmation. This is independent of bundling and provides sub-second finality backed by slashable stake.

The bundling market is designed to be competitive. Anyone can run a bundler—there's no staking requirement, no approval process, no geographic restriction. Users can submit to any bundler, self-bundle, or submit to multiple bundlers simultaneously. All fees are visible on-chain, so users can compare prices and switch freely. These dynamics drive fees toward marginal cost as bundlers compete on price, latency, and reliability.