Decentralized Collaboration Between Keep and NuCypher

With feedback from stakers, community members, and developers from both networks, together we’re proposing something new: the first decentralized, on-chain protocol merge. We believe this is the first effort to merge protocols in this way.

Our two networks have shared goals: driving the adoption of threshold cryptography, privacy-preserving technology, and decentralized Bitcoin on Ethereum. Our communities are aligned as well, with stakers who want to realize the vision of a freedom-preserving world built on cryptography, and developers who refuse to compromise when it comes to end-user security.

The proposal

With the consent of our stakers and community governance multisig, the Keep team is proposing a hard merge with the NuCypher protocol, to form an extended network in a 50/50 on-chain collaboration between both communities.

This entails combining the two protocols and staking networks as well as development efforts, allowing both communities to rally behind a new network inheriting the best aspects of each.

We believe that teaming up is the best way forward. As we see every day in Ethereum, cooperation and composability often trump competition. The Keep and NuCypher networks have built similar technology with similar goals. Rather than continuing to split the market, we think we can achieve significantly more together. And while both dev teams will remain independent, we’ll all be focused on a single protocol.

Keep and NuCypher combining forces to bring more useful services, and more fees, into a joint network is the surest path to long term sustainability and success of the work-token model for threshold cryptography.

Implementing a combined network

Combining the NU and KEEP protocols requires committing to a few important decisions upfront to ensure the resulting network is more resilient, decentralized, and sustainable than the sum of its parts.

First, we’ll only proceed with the blessing of our communities. Once given, we’ll proceed to launch a new staking contract that supports both NU and KEEP as work tokens. A DAO will be established to govern this contract, making sure the participation of both NU and KEEP remains weighted to 50/50. Finally, tBTC v2 will be deployed on the integrated network, paying out rewards to those who participate in securing the new network.

Once tBTC v2 is deployed to the combined network, the number of candidate stakers can be as many as 2200 at launch. After the rollout of v2, the new network will not only host the most widely decentralized custodial solution in existence, it will have removed all economic bottlenecks present in tBTC v1. This will be an important milestone in establishing tBTC as the leading BTC-ETH bridge.

We believe this collaboration presents a unique opportunity for both Keep and NuCypher. As the first on-chain hard merge, it has the potential to positively define how collaboration in our space works going forward, while providing material benefits to both projects and establishing the combined network as the leading BTC-ETH bridge.

Want to learn more?

We have our formal proposal up on our governance forums here.

Community is the heart of Keep, and we look forward to hearing your feedback on this opportunity. Join the community on Discord at chat.keep.network.