Design Principles

LayerBTC is engineered around six core principles that guide every architectural and product decision. Together they ensure the protocol expands Bitcoin’s capabilities without diluting its security, ethos, or usability.

Bitcoin-First Integrity

• Main-chain settlement: All value ultimately anchors to Bitcoin’s base layer—no novel consensus, no additional inflationary token.

• Native primitives only: Taproot outputs, MuSig2 signatures, PSBT workflows, and Lightning channels form the entire cryptographic foundation; no bespoke opcodes or exotic VMs.

Modularity over Monoliths

• Lego-style stack: Assets, Payments, Vaults, and Dev-Hub function independently and expose clear interfaces, letting builders integrate only what they need.

• Loose coupling: Modules communicate through gRPC/REST and standardized PSBT metadata, ensuring upgrades or replacements never break the rest of the system.

UX by Default

• Human-centric abstractions: Auto-channel management, clear error surfaces, and second-level payment finality make Lightning feel as smooth as web payments.

• Drop-in components: Pre-built React hooks, Flutter widgets, and CLI tools shrink time-to-prototype from weeks to hours.

• Recovery flows that make sense: Social recovery, delayed-spend vault exits, and one-tap backups are baked into the reference wallets.

Security-by-Design

• Minimised attack surface: No global smart-contract VM; each module keeps logic as close to cryptographic primitives as possible.

• Audit transparency: Core libraries undergo periodic third-party security reviews; reports are public and tied to semantic version tags

• Fail-safe defaults: Timelocks, rate limits, and replay-protection are enabled out-of-the-box, not as optional add-ons.

Privacy When You Need It

• Layered controls: Route blinding, CoinJoin hooks, and Silent Payments can be toggled per transaction or per app flow.

• Selective disclosure: Asset metadata and ownership proofs support Schnorr-based commitments, enabling granular sharing without full chain analysis exposure.

Open Source & Community-Driven

• Permissive licensing: All core code is MIT-licensed to encourage commercial and non-commercial adoption.

• Transparent governance: Roadmaps, issue tracking, and design discussions live in public repositories; major changes follow BIP-style review.

• Incentives for contribution: Formal review credits, bug-bounty tiers, and funded grants cultivate a healthy developer ecosystem.

Collectively, these principles ensure BTC OmniLayer remains true to Bitcoin’s trust model while giving developers the tools and user experience required for modern, real-world applications. The next section translates these principles into concrete architecture.