Alpen Labs just crossed a milestone that Bitcoin DeFi watchers have been tracking for months. The company announced that more than 21 launch partners have begun integrating on Testnet III, its latest testing environment built on Bitcoin Signet, as the project inches closer to a mainnet launch.

Bridge operators Stakely and Chainflow are already live on the testnet, with P2P.org expected to join soon. The goal is stress-testing the Strata bridge, Alpen’s core infrastructure piece that uses a 1-of-N trust model for Bitcoin transactions. In English: only one operator in the entire set needs to be honest for the bridge to remain secure. That’s a meaningfully lower trust assumption than most bridges in crypto, which have historically been the industry’s favorite attack surface.

What Alpen is actually building

Alpen Labs is building Bitcoin-native financial infrastructure, the kind of programmable layer that lets people lend, borrow, and mint stablecoins without leaving the Bitcoin ecosystem. The centerpiece of that vision is the Strata bridge, which connects Bitcoin to Alpen’s execution environment.

Testnet III features what Alpen describes as the first publicly usable garbled circuit-based Bitcoin verifier. Garbled circuits are a cryptographic technique that allows computation to be verified without revealing the underlying data. Applied to Bitcoin verification, this could enable stronger privacy and security guarantees than traditional approaches.

The public testnet first went live on August 4, 2025. The Testnet III partner announcement was made on July 28, 2026.

The Bitcoin Dollar and Liquity partnership

Perhaps the most commercially significant piece of Alpen’s roadmap is BTD, short for Bitcoin Dollar. It’s a BTC-backed stablecoin being developed in collaboration with the Liquity team, the same group behind the LUSD stablecoin on Ethereum.

Funding and the team behind it

Alpen Labs was founded in 2022 by a group of MIT alumni. The company has raised approximately $19.1 million from investors including Ribbit Capital and Castle Island Ventures. Alpen emerged from stealth mode in April 2024 after securing $10.6 million in a seed funding round led by Ribbit Capital, which also included contributions from Castle Island Ventures and Stillmark. The company is led by CEO Simanta Gautam.

The 21-plus partner count for Testnet III is worth contextualizing. For a Bitcoin-native project that hasn’t launched its mainnet yet, assembling that many integration partners signals genuine ecosystem interest.

What this means for investors

The 1-of-N trust model on the Strata bridge is particularly relevant for investors evaluating risk. Traditional multi-sig bridges require a majority of operators to remain honest. Alpen’s model only requires one. The Strata bridge employs a hybrid optimistic-ZK approach and draws inspiration from research conducted by the BitVM2 initiative, developed in collaboration with the BitVM Alliance.