Keep Protocol has raised over $7 million through a token sale in order to build a second layer for Ethereum to enhance the blockchain’s privacy.
At the same time, the token sale will finance the development of tBTC, a bitcoin token based on the Ethereum blockchain, similar to the project that is being developed by the British company Provable Things (formerly Oraclize).
After years of fundraising rounds, the project has now reached an acceptable level of funding in order to expand development to improve the blockchain world, especially with regard to privacy on Ethereum (ETH) and the scalability of Bitcoin (BTC).
As far as bitcoin is concerned, Keep wants to create a token pegged to the value of BTC, but on the Ethereum blockchain in order to have the possibility to use bitcoin on a blockchain faster than the native one and access decentralized finance (DeFi).
Other projects similar to Keep
In reality, this is not the first time that a company has set itself this goal considering that pTokens and WBTC are already working on, or rather have already made possible, this type of initiative and that, according to some data, there are even more BTC on Ethereum than on Lightning Network thanks to the development of these projects which are now part of DeFi.
We should put resources toward a proper (trustless, serverless, maximally Uniswap-like UX) ETH <-> BTC decentralized exchange. It's embarrassing that we still can't easily move between the two largest crypto ecosystems trustlessly.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 24, 2020
In any case, Keep has stated that its tBTC will be available on April 27th.
Another important aspect of the Keep protocol is that it wants to allow the Ethereum blockchain to have private transactions, keeping the data off-chain and allowing only certain contracts to access them.
Meanwhile, Ethereum is also trying in other ways to increase the privacy of its blockchain as it wants to integrate the Zk-snarks solution of Zcash also for ETH transactions.
