Hey Stackers!

Long time listener to Stacker News Live and lurker on stacker.news, its good to be here!

For the past 18 months our team has been building out AnchorWatch (AnchorWatch.com), our goal is to provide quality insurance for Bitcoin held in cold storage. Currently, institutional bitcoin holders are often not able to self custody their bitcoin, and as a result have to keep their coins on sole custodians. Many custodians have no insurance, and those that do have weak coverages which often do not cover the risks you are actually concerned about.

We believe there is a better way to do this, and its done by leveraging the native properties of Bitcoin as programmable money. We have been building a wallet coordinator called Trident, which leverages miniscript to do more advanced bitcoin native smart contracts without requiring a fork. Miniscript came from the research team in Blockstream back in 2019, and it allows for more approachable ways of using timelocks and signatures in a way where we can have a transparent and auditable way of interacting with more advanced scripting schemes.

With respect to insurance, this allows our company to be a required signer for the duration of the insurance policy, but when we are no longer holding risk, we are able to allow users to withdraw from vaults without needing to talk to us. This is able to mitigate risks such as theft, natural disasters, lost keys and more. Unlike other custodians, we are able to only have influence over the length of the insurance policy, you don't have to trust us that we will give you access to your coins again.

For a pleb, you can construct more robust security schemes, when compared to legacy multisig (2 of 3, 3 of 5 etc). Some examples of this are 2 of 3 which will become a 1 of 3 if the funds have not moved in a year. Alternatively you could have a 2 of 3, which maybe becomes a 2 of 4, and you can add an additional emergency backup key to the quorum. I'd recommend checking out the Wizardsardine team and their Liana wallet if you want to play around with this on mainnet today. I'm a big proponent of miniscript and believe it will make bespoke security arrangements much more approachable to everyone that uses Bitcoin today.

Trident currently works with Ledger, Coldcard MK4 (with their edge firmware), and SpecterDIY. The Bitbox02 team just added miniscript support last week, and the Blockstream Jade is coming soon. We built Trident to help remove the UX friction associated with multisigs (constructing output descriptors, sharing xpubs, generating PSBTs, requesting signatures, etc). For example, you can upload an XPUB with a signing device to Trident, and then share it with another user of Trident. Or, you can request a key from someone to let them share their XPUB with you. This allows you to be signers in each others bitcoins security without having to coordinate each time you want to create a new vault. Once a vault is created, the vault owner can create a spend, and then request signers within the vault to sign off on the transaction. The goal is for groups of people to be able to coordinate around bitcoin vaults that abstract away the technical details while still being able to remain sovereign and audit any individual step if you so wish.

Miniscript output descriptors can be loaded into core, so even in the event Trident ceases to exist, if you back up your output descriptor you are able to load it into a bitcoin core wallet and still maintain access to the funds (as of version 25 of Core).

Trident will be entering open beta at the end of this week (locked to testnet), and I'll make another post once live for everyone to go check it out!

(Saw a cool feature where I can forward sats to other stacker.news users, I picked some of my favorite stackers to pass the sats onto, i'm passing along 100% of sats to them)