Bridges, Wrappers and MPC: The Safest Path for Bitcoin Liquidity
Over 60% of Bitcoin’s supply hasn’t moved in over a year. And the enduring question is how to put BTC to work on-chain, securely and in any market cycle, without giving up the very security that makes it valuable. Most approaches fall into three categories: token bridges, custodial wrappers, and the multi-party-computation (MPC) model Atlas Protocol uses. While all can move BTC across networks, only MPC preserves self-custody and eliminates the single points of failure behind roughly $2.2 billion in crypto thefts in 2024 (Chainalysis)
The limits of bridges and wrappers
Bridges lock BTC at a designated Bitcoin address, mint a synthetic asset on another network, and burn it for redemption. The core question is who controls the release keys.
Custodial mints like WBTC on Ethereum store BTC with a regulated custodian such as BitGo. Liquidity is deep, but users are exposed to custodian policy, blacklisting, and regulatory action.
Federated pegs or sidechains like Liquid’s L-BTC or Rootstock’s rBTC use multisig run by a group of functionaries. Speed and tooling improve, but security still depends on federation honesty.
Threshold or custody-focused MPC pegs like tBTC distribute control among multiple signers, reducing single-party trust but still requiring governance, redemption processes, and reliance on the MPC group to release BTC.
Hacks like Ronin and Wormhole, though not involving BTC, showed how concentrated key control can fail catastrophically. Even well-managed models still carry trust surfaces and policy risk. Wrappers shift smart-contract risk to custodial and legal risk, as seen with renBTC’s shutdown after the FTX/Alameda collapse, which left unrecoverable assets and had been used to launder over $540M since 2020.
This is where Atlas takes a different path. Instead of relying on custodians, federations, or custody MPC networks, Atlas keeps BTC under native L1 control and staked using NEAR Chain Signatures, enabling cross-chain liquidity without bridge contracts or redemption key risks.
Why Atlas’s MPC model is different
NEAR Chain Signatures distributes shards of a private key across independent nodes. When a user deposits native BTC, these nodes co-sign a stake transaction to a Bitcoin staking layer (such as BitHive or Babylon) and mint atBTC on any supported network without ever reconstructing the key or introducing a bridge contract as a failure point.
Because deposits remain on Bitcoin L1 and the private key never exists in one place, an attacker would need to compromise every signer and the L1 vault at the same time, a far harder task than draining a hot wallet, breaching a custodian, or colluding with a federation.
This preserves Bitcoin’s core security while enabling seamless cross-chain liquidity for both EVM and non-EVM environments.
The shift toward verifiable security
Two forces are converging:
Security reality In 2024, $2.2 billion was stolen in 303 crypto hacks, showing that concentrated key control remains the industry’s weakest link.
Accounting clarity New U.S. standards (FASB ASU 2023-08) will let companies carry crypto at fair value starting late 2024. This will push treasuries toward solutions with verifiable on-chain control and minimal single-key exposure.
Atlas meets both requirements. It holds native BTC under distributed MPC control, ensures fully auditable mint and burn flows, and delivers cross-chain mobility without custodial wrappers or app-to-app bridges.
Bottom line
While bridges provide speed and wrappers provide convenience, both introduce trust you did not need on Bitcoin. Atlas’s MPC path keeps custody distributed, liquidity portable, and yields native so you can put BTC to work without ever giving up the keys.
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