Why Stroom?
An analysis of the current BTC bridging landscape, its risks and limitations, and how Stroom introduces a new, economically secure, yield-generating alternative.
Bitcoin lacks a native DeFi ecosystem, making bridging the only viable path for BTC holders to access decentralized financial applications. As of mid-2025, the BTC bridging market has grown to over $35 billion, with Bitcoin comprising 70% of the total value locked (TVL) across all cross-chain bridges. Yet, only ~2% of Bitcoin’s total circulating supply is currently bridged, highlighting significant untapped potential for growth.
The Problem
There are two fundamental challenges with BTC bridging:
Counterparty Risk Regardless of whether a bridge is managed by a centralized custodian, a permissioned federation, or a decentralized protocol, users face the risk that operators could mint unbacked BTC, block withdrawals, or even misappropriate user funds.
Opportunity Cost Bridged native BTC is typically idle—locked in smart contract or multisig cold storage without generating yield, which makes it capital-inefficient in DeFi environments.
Existing Solutions
Current BTC bridges fall into four broad categories:
Despite architectural differences, all of these solutions share two critical limitations:
They offer no economic guarantees to cover user losses in the event of compromised operators.
They do not provide any native BTC yield to the holders of the bridged asset.
Stroom’s Solution
Stroom introduces strBTC, a novel BTC bridge architecture that addresses both key limitations. It is the only BTC bridge economically secured by restaking, with slashing mechanisms in place to cover potential user losses caused by malicious operators. Additionally, strBTC is the first yield-bearing BTC that sources real, low-risk yield from native Bitcoin infrastructure—such as the Lightning Network and BitVM2—making it both secure and capital-efficient.
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