Alpen Labs

Alpen Labs is a bitcoin infrastructure developer building Strata, a zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup that settles natively through the bitcoin network. The company's stated aim is to add privacy, programmability and scalability to bitcoin without changing the properties of the base layer, positioning blockchains as verifiers of proofs rather than executors of complex computation. Its product framing covers vaults and self-custody, BTC-collateralized borrowing and stablecoins, yield, and payments, offered to developers as components to integrate into their own products, including an SDK and an MCP surface referenced on its website.

The protocol work is developed largely in the open: the company's GitHub organization hosts 68 repositories, mostly in Rust and under the Apache-2.0 license, including a Rust implementation of the Alpen protocol, the Strata Bridge reference implementation, the Mosaic garbled-circuits protocol, zkaleido (traits and adapters unifying different zkVMs), Bitcoin Output Script Descriptor (BOSD), an async BitcoinD JSON-RPC client, a proof-of-work faucet for bitcoin signets and the Alpen EVM, and a checkpoint explorer. Alpen describes its design as letting developers program arbitrary locking conditions for BTC — subject to block size and gas limits — enabling new signature types (e.g. P-256), time-delayed and cancellable vaults, subscription-style withdrawal allowances, end-to-end encrypted transactions verified with zero-knowledge proofs, economically-secured zero-confirmation payments, and collateralized borrowing against BTC.

Alpen Labs also publishes open research. Its "ZK Rollup on Bitcoin" whitepaper, released publicly in June 2024, described a design requiring a bitcoin soft fork; that line of work was subsequently paused in favor of a rollup design buildable on bitcoin as it exists today, based on the company's SNARKnado research.

Founding story

Alpen Labs was started in June 2022. Its founders have personal backgrounds in Nepal, a country where roughly 25% of GDP comes from remittances, which shaped an early focus on using bitcoin to disintermediate middlemen and lower the cost of global payments. The team first explored the Lightning Network, but concluded that Lightning would face challenges around privacy, centralization and user experience as usage grew. Later in 2022, while researching zero-knowledge cryptography, the founders concluded that zk-SNARKs would be a core part of scaling bitcoin globally and were consistent with bitcoin's design philosophy that blockchains should verify rather than execute computation.

Business model

Alpen Labs develops open-source bitcoin scaling infrastructure and offers financial primitives — vaults, credit and yield — for other companies to integrate into their products via an SDK and developer access to its rollup. The website directs prospective integrators to a contact form.

Traction

Developers were able to build on Strata via devnet access as of January 2025, with a public testnet announced as upcoming and mainnet targeted for 2025. The company's GitHub organization hosts 68 repositories with continuing commit activity; its most-starred project, the Rust implementation of the Alpen protocol, has 104 stars and 30 forks.

Latest developments

In January 2025 Alpen Labs announced an $8.5M strategic round co-led by DBA and Cyber Fund, with participation from earlier seed investors Ribbit Capital, Castle Island Ventures and Geometry, intended to accelerate development and the 2025 mainnet launch of Strata. Public repositories including the Alpen protocol implementation, Strata Bridge, Mosaic and zkaleido continued to be updated through August 2026.