Financial markets no longer have to choose between

Lightpaper Whitepaper Consensus Paper
Security

Unprecedented security stems from innovating the Proof-Of-Stake mechanism.

Mintlayer’s Dynamic Slot Allocation (DSA) consensus merges Proof-Of-Stake and Bitcoin technologies to make decentralized financial markets attack-proof.

The Proof-of-Stake system alone has innate flaws because it’s missing the security layers native to the Proof-of-Work mechanism. Proof-of-Work alone, too, cannot compare to the security of Bitcoin.

Mintlayer’s DSA combines both mechanisms to make a network that’s secure regardless of scale.
Mintlayer decentralizes finance by using three dimensions to solve security threats:
Bitcoin anchoring

Every block on Mintlayer anchors to a block on Bitcoin. Using the timespace of Bitcoin, each Mintlayer round lasts 1008 Bitcoin blocks, or a week. This frees Mintlayer from the dependency on external sources in time validation, solving PoS-based blockchain problems.

Checkpoint system

The protocol’s checkpoint system protects Mintlayer against Proof-of-Stake long-range attacks, even in cases where a single participant can obtain more than 50% of the network. Any network participant can enforce checkpoints from Mintlayer on Bitcoin to ensure the network's irreversibility.

Randomized selection

To create and validate blocks, the protocol selects random stakers. This ensures that every user has an equally random chance of participation in the chain's maintenance, depending on the amount staked.

Scalability

Fitting more into less.

Users can batch multi-token transfers into a single transaction to increase scalability. Block size is limited to 1MB, and signature aggregation reduces each payment's size by 70% to avoid network clogging. This ensures low transaction fees even at scale.

Sending transactions through peer-to-peer batching, Mintlayer retains scalability:

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1

Users create a transfer, opting in for peer-to-peer batching

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2

Signature aggregation compresses each payment to 1/3 of its weight

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3

Multi-token transaction is grouped with transfers from other users and then transmitted to the blockchain

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The transfer’s value is split across multiple receivers

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Users pay lower transfer fees and retain privacy, without network pollution

Inside Mintlayer

A protocol for every financial usability.

Wallet

The full spectrum of users, from institutional investors to beginner traders, benefits from Mintlayer’s wallet. In this non-custodial solution, users can access their funds from a hardware wallet or via private keys.

  • Store or transfer any cryptocurrency or use existing wrapped tokens from any blockchains

  • Redeem BTC on Bitcoin mainnet

  • Run a node from any device

Tokenization

Mintlayer connects tokens from different blockchains into an interconnected ecosystem. The protocol supports security tokens, asset tokenization, derivatives, and more, so users can choose their preferred type of investment.

  • Migrate tokens from widely-adopted blockchains

  • Build decentralized, all-inclusive applications

  • Issue a token without technical knowledge

Decentralized Exchange

The protocol runs a built-in DEX. Being native, it supports atomic-swap and is a censorship-resistant exchange. Users can verify their identity from the wallet application and get cleared through the Access-Control-List to access Security token trades.

  • Share orders & initiate trades without 3rd-party intermediaries

  • Exchange Bitcoin cross-chain directly on Mintlayer

  • Trade any assets directly from the wallet

Features

Built to be compatible with blockchain ecosystems.

Mintlayer is compatible with:

Bitcoin lightning network

Native multisignature

BIP32, BIP38 and BIP174.

Hardware wallet integration for private keys

UTXO structure

Developer-enabled.

Developers who integrate with or build on top of Mintlayer get access to a simple API, supportive documentation, RFC, and an importing tool for ERC20 tokens from the Ethereum blockchain. Open-source development is incentivized with community grants.

Free of Bitcoin pollution.

Transactions made on Mintlayer do not take up space on the Bitcoin blockchain. Network security checkpoints take up as much space as an average Bitcoin transaction — these are used to prevent attacks from entities with large stakes.

Use Cases

Built for financial use cases.

Truly Decentralized Trading

Benefit from built-in P2P atomic swap exchange. Trade assets on Mintlayer or trade Bitcoin on its native chain.

Security Tokens

Use built-in decentralized tools for fundraising on primary and secondary markets—access-control-list compliant.

Stablecoins

Lightning Network compatibility allows stablecoin use to provide users with faster and cheaper transactions.

Non-custodian asset storage

Protect assets under private keys. Mintlayer’s single wallet stores all cryptocurrencies, security tokens, and collectibles.

DeFi dApps

Turing incomplete smart contracts provide reliability and outcome predictability for dApps. Supports tokenomic models of taxation, dividend distribution, and others.

Confidential Settlements

UTXO’s inherent structure, combined with transaction batching, shuffles payment and balance history to make transactions anonymous. Supports complete anonymity with ‘Confidential Transaction’ mode.

Timeline

Roadmap.

2020
Q4
Q2
Mintlayer idea is born
Q3
Dynamic Slot Allotment (DSA) Conceptualization
Q4
DSA Testing and Prototyping
2021
2021
Q1
Institutional Private Sale
Q3
Testnet Full Node
Basic POS Consensus
Q4
Full Node Release Candidate
2022
2022
Q1
Public Sale, Mainnet Launch
Q2
DSA Consensus System Upgrade
Q3
Native Tokenization System
Q3
Programmable Pools and Smart Contracts
Q4
Atomic Swap DEX
2023
2023
Q1
Access Control Lists
Q2
Confidential Transactions
Q3
Lightning Network Integration
Faq

We want you to ask questions.

What is the benefit compared to Ethereum?
  • Efficiency: Mintlayer allows batching/coinjoin transactions, even between different tokens. A batched payment weights about ⅓ of a traditional Ethereum transaction and grants more privacy against blockchain analysis.
  • Long term scalability: as being compatible with Bitcoin's smart-contract, it fully supports Lightning Network, while Ethereum's sharding has not been implemented yet.
  • Sustainability: a full node can be run on an average PC which is not dedicated, while Ethereum requires a dedicated 500gb SSD (and the space requirement increases of about 150gb/year), about 16gb RAM and a good CPU. Nowadays, to sync a new week of Ethereum blockchain life, a full node requires an entire day on the most powerful machines, which is unsustainable in the long run.
  • Reliability: a Mintlayer unpruned full node syncs as fast as a Bitcoin node (just slightly heavier when the blockchain is saturated), while an Ethereum archival node requires about 4 terabyte, increasing by 2 terabyte per year. To query for an intermediate balance state, a user must apply to an archival node, which is likely a third party. These “big scary” archival nodes might also disappear in the future: today, it takes weeks to sync an archival node from the genesis or to reconstruct it from a full node.
What is the benefit compared to Bitcoin?

The main goal of the Mintlayer sidechain is tokenization. The native token represents the stake of the blocksigners: a) the ownership of the slots and b) the economic incentives to properly run the chain. Technically speaking, a difference between Bitcoin and Mintlayer transactions is, for the latter, the possibility of an Access Control List which allows for whitelisting/blacklisting the destination addresses or to create spending/receiving conditions (for example, that address can receive at most 100 tokens, or cannot spend before 1000 blocks). It is a core feature of the security tokens, which guarantees more compliance to legal requirements. ACLs today are possible on Ethereum, but not on Bitcoin.

Why not merged mining?

Not all Bitcoin miners are expected to do merged mining, so the players with an active role in the governing of the sidechain would be a subset of the Bitcoin miners. This centralizes the government of the sidechain in the hands of a few Bitcoin mining pools, handing the power to the mining-controllers of the pool, not the miners themselves.
In case of a malicious pool in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the individual miners are likely to move the hash rate to a different pool, while a Bitcoin miner has no direct incentives in avoiding a pool that is acting maliciously on the sidechain. Hence, in a merged mining system there are no economic incentives preventing a possible attack on the sidechain from a Bitcoin pool. Additionally, even if the miners had control, they might have no interest in the well-being of the sidechain, if they aren't invested in it in the first place.