[Resource Topic] 2025/964: TOOP: A transfer of ownership protocol over Bitcoin

Welcome to the resource topic for 2025/964

Title:
TOOP: A transfer of ownership protocol over Bitcoin

Authors: Ariel Futoranski, Fadi Barbara, Ramses Fernandez, Gabriel Larotonda, Sergio Lerner

Abstract:

The Transfer of Ownership Protocol (TOOP) enables a secure transfer of assets from Bitcoin to other blockchains and back. This is achieved through a committee-based validation protocol that requires only 1-out-of-nhonest security. The protocol operates in distinct phases: the lock phase, where the initial setup and individual assets are locked on Bitcoin, and the unlocking with ownership transfer phase, where the asset is transferred to a possibly different legitimate owner. This protocol solves a limitation of all existing BitVM-like protocols that restricts the unlocking transfers to only addresses known and preregistered during lock and setup. Accordingly, our protocol avoids the financially costly, regulatory problematic, and congestion-prone front-and-reimburse paradigm. TOOP has been implemented for the first time in Cardinal, a protocol for wrapping Bitcoin Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTxOs) onto the Cardano blockchain, with Bitcoin Ordinals represented as Cardano Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/964

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