🗺️ How It Works
Polybeam enables the seamless transfer of Bitcoin-native Runes to Starknet, allowing users to interact with them as ERC-20 tokens within the Starknet ecosystem. This unlocks DeFi access, composability, and scalability for Bitcoin assets.
🔁 Deposits and Withdrawals
1. Deposit Flow (Bitcoin → Starknet)
- A user initiates a transfer by sending Runes to a unique deposit address controlled by the bridge federation on Bitcoin.
- Once the Bitcoin transaction is confirmed on-chain, the bridge infrastructure detects the deposit via an indexer.
- Upon detection, a smart corresponding contract on Starknet automatically mints a corresponding amount of wrapped Runes (ERC-20) to the user’s Starknet address.
2. Withdrawal Flow (Starknet → Bitcoin)
- A user requests a withdrawal by initiating a burn of wrapped Runes on Starknet, specifying their destination Bitcoin address.
- The bridge verifies the burn transaction and initiates a payout of native Runes from the federation wallet on Bitcoin to the specified address.
- Withdrawals to Bitcoin are batched for efficiency and may take a bit to process.
🛡️ Security Measures
- Federation Wallet: A multi-signature federation wallet on Bitcoin securely holds deposited Runes until withdrawal is requested.
- Smart Contracts: Starknet contracts with strict upgrade policies enforce the minting and burning logic, and the bridge has strict rules on supply synchronization.
- Audits: Every bridge component has undergone rigorous third-party audits and security reviews. We follow best practices for cross-chain asset bridges.
- Monitoring & Coordination: Decentralized infrastructure components monitor both Bitcoin and Starknet chains, ensuring accurate, censorship-resistant, and verifiable operations without central points of failure.
🧰 Developer Resources
Adding Your Rune: Our supported runes are publicized on GitHub. If you think there's a Rune we should support, please make a Pull Request and we'll review. Please keep in mind that additional development work is required to add any new runes to the bridge. Security and uptime are our first priorities so it may take us a bit to review any requests.
Documentation: Additional and further detailed technical documentation, including how to integrate with the bridge is forthcoming.