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Unspendable Labs, today announced Kontor, a next-generation Bitcoin metaprotocol bringing programmable assets and scalable file storage directly to Bitcoin.
Unspendable Labs, founded by Adam Krellenstein today announced Kontor, a next-generation Bitcoin metaprotocol bringing programmable assets and scalable file storage directly to Bitcoin. The announcement took place at the founder's keynote presentation at Bitcoin Amsterdam.
The Kontor project addresses a critical gap within the Bitcoin ecosystem: while billions flow into Bitcoin ETFs and institutional adoption accelerates, the infrastructure for programmable Bitcoin assets has lagged behind, and the community is deeply divided over how to scale the network while staying true to Bitcoin’s original promise.
Unlike Layer-2 solutions, which move activity off-chain and threaten Bitcoin’s economic health, Kontor extends the functionality of Bitcoin by building directly on top of it. Each Kontor transaction is a Bitcoin transaction and fully secured by Bitcoin's hashpower; there are no validators, bridges, sequencers or sidechains, and all logic is executed on-chain. Kontor qualitatively improves on the state of the art among metaprotocols with its Sigil smart contract framework, persistent file storage protocol and thoughtful tokenomics:
Sigil Smart Contracts: Kontor enables developers to write, deploy and run rich smart contract applications directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. The Sigil framework uses the new WebAssembly Component Model to make writing contracts for WebAssembly easier than ever before, with strong type safety, rich types, native cross-contract calls and best-in-class developer ergonomics. Writing contracts with Sigil feels just like writing normal software.
Perpetual File Storage: A "pay-once, store-forever" model for file storage secured by Bitcoin's hashpower, offering the highest-levels of data persistence without bloating the underlying blockchain. For Bitcoin users that want an alternative to embedding file data directly in transactions, which externalizes costs to the whole network and is still extremely expensive, Kontor offers a novel solution that truly complements Bitcoin’s built-in functionality to scale to meet user demand.
KOR Native Token: The Kontor economic model was designed from first principles to support data storage and smart contract execution. Keeping BTC as its primary unit of account, Kontor smart contract execution burns KOR, which Bitcoin users can purchase trustlessly in single-confirmation atomic swaps. KOR emissions incentivize perpetual data storage and scale dynamically to keep inflation within bounds.
"The time is past for science projects and proofs of concept. Bitcoin doesn’t need to be like Ethereum for it to grow and change," said Adam Krellenstein, CEO of Unspendable Labs. "We’re bringing new functionality to Bitcoin without trying to turn it into something it isn’t.”
Kontor is currently under active development, with Bitcoin signet and testnet support and a block explorer at [kor.space](http://kor.space). The Kontor Indexer codebase is fully open-source, with protocol documentation hosted on [project website](<a href="https://kontor.network/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://kontor.network</a>). For more information about Kontor, follow&nbsp;<a href="https://x.com/kontornetwork" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">https://x.com/kontornetwork</a>&nbsp;on X.
About Unspendable Labs 
Unspendable Labs is a blockchain technology company pioneering Bitcoin-native infrastructure. In 2014, the Unspendable Labs’s CEO, Adam Krellenstein, launched Counterparty, which featured the first blockchain-based decentralized exchange, prediction markets, trustless gaming and financial derivatives, as well as supported the very earliest NFT collections, including Rare Pepes and Spells of Genesis. Unspendable Labs helps to support the open-source Counterparty reference implementation, and it operates Horizon Market and Horizon Wallet for the greater Bitcoin digital asset ecosystem.

Counterparty Creator Announces Kontor: a New Metaprotocol for Bitcoin-Native Smart Contracts and Scalable File Storage

The Bitcoin Daily

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