Trust Machines: The Story So Far

One of the most exciting crypto startups to launch this year is Trust Machines, which burst into the limelight in February when it announced itself to the world along with an impressive $150 million funding round. Trust Machines made headlines with its ambitious goal of creating an entire ecosystem of decentralized applications on Bitcoin, the oldest and most valuable blockchain of all. 

Ever since then, Trust Machines has been on a mission to revamp Bitcoin completely, working to transform it far beyond its current use case of a simple payment network and store of value. The startup wants nothing less than to make Bitcoin the center of the growing decentralized finance economy, taking advantage of its unrivaled popularity and liquidity in the world of crypto. 

It’s an appreciable goal because Bitcoin is by far and away the most valuable crypto asset. Not only does it have the biggest market capitalization of all digital coins but it also has the largest user base and market adoption. It’s because of this that Trust Machines was able to secure funding from a range of backers, including Breyer Capital, Digital Currency Group (the parent company of CoinDesk), GoldenTree, Hivemind, and Union Square Ventures. 

The Team

Trust Machines is led by Chief Executive Officer Muneeb Ali, the co-founder of the Stacks blockchain that has made Bitcoin programmable. Ali, who also serves as the CEO of Hiro Systems, is a computer scientist with a Ph.D and Masters in Computer Science from Princeton University, where his Ph.D thesis was nominated for the ACM SIGCOMM dissertation award. He’s also a distinguished speaker on Bitcoin and other crypto topics at Princeton, and his research publications have received more than 1,900 citations. Ali, who is one of the main characters in the book Life After Google, also served as a technical advisor on the hit HBO show Silicon Valley. 

Ali’s co-founder at Trust Machines is JP Singh, who has served as a Hiro board member since 2019 and is a long-time entrepreneur with $680M+ in exits.

Since announcing itself to the world in February, Trust Machines has put a lot of energy into building up an all-star team of top crypto personalities. In June it announced the triple hiring of team members Manas Mohapatra and Igor Sylvestor, along with Asiff Hirji as a key advisor. Mohapatra joined as Trust Machine’s new General Counsel and will be responsible for helping the company to navigate the regulatory landscape as it grows its ecosystem of Bitcoin apps, while Sylvestor will be heading up its engineering team. 

On the communications side, Trust Machines has also hired the renowned crypto influencer and Twitter personality Aubrey Strobel, in addition to former Kraken director of growth Dan Held, who’ll take on an active role in building DeFi on Bitcoin while also serving as a marketing partner. Another key hire is the former Binance US Head of Exchange Rena Shah, who now serves as Trust Machine’s Head of Strategy and Operations. 

The Mission

Trust Machine will build an ecosystem of dApps on Bitcoin by leveraging the unique capabilities of Ali’s Stacks blockchain, which serves as a kind of programmable layer for Bitcoin. 

Stacks is a Layer-1 blockchain that’s directly connected to Bitcoin, with all of its transactions settling on the world’s original blockchain. Stacks connects to Bitcoin via its unique “Proof-of-Transfer” consensus mechanism, which uses Bitcoin to secure its own blockchain. Stacks is a programmable infrastructure layer that connects to Bitcoin with a 1:1 block ratio, meaning that whatever happens on Stacks can be verified on Bitcoin’s blockchain. 

Because Stacks is so tightly integrated with Bitcoin, it is able to bring smart contracts to the world’s oldest cryptocurrency, which was never possible before. In this way, Stacks makes it possible to build dApps that can utilize BTC as a native token. What this means is that it’s now possible to build DeFi protocols around permissionless borrowing and lending that utilize BTC itself. 

Bitcoin’s Advantage

Trust Machines has lots of good reasons to want to build an ecosystem around Bitcoin. As the world’s original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin offers unrivaled security – a key consideration for many investors. Because Stacks settles all of its transactions on Bitcoin, it means that it shares in the security of the Bitcoin network itself. Bitcoin, of course, is well understood to be the most secure of all blockchains. Throughout its 13-year history, it has never been hacked. Moreover, it’s highly unlikely that it ever will be, as it has been estimated that the financial resources required to carry out a “51% attack” on Bitcoin would cost far more than whatever could possibly be gained from such an attack. 

Another reason for Trust Machines to want to build on Bitcoin is its liquidity. Bitcoin had a market capitalization of more than $430 billion in August 2022, far more than any other blockchain. Yet, the vast majority of those funds are sitting idle, being held in users’ wallets. Trust Machines recognize the potential of that idle value, which could be put to much better use through liquidity pools and protocols for decentralized lending, where it would generate yield for holders.

Moreover, Bitcoin has by far and away the biggest user base of any cryptocurrency. The vast majority of people learn about Bitcoin before the wider world of crypto. Bitcoin is usually the first coin that most people buy, and it also has a very strong hardcore base of Bitcoin maximalists who refuse to hold any other token. This community is a strong believer in Bitcoin’s long-term destiny to ultimately become a kind of global reserve currency. 

Decentralized Trust

Trust Machines derives its name from the concept of “decentralization of trust”, which is something it says is perfectly embodied by Bitcoin itself. It praises Bitcoin as one of the most impactful technological innovations of the past 20 years. Just as the Internet transformed communication and access for billions of people across the world, Bitcoin is transforming the concept of trust. That’s a big deal because “trust” is a key component of almost every human activity, be it financial transactions, the ownership of assets, proof of identity, matters of arbitration, or governance. 

Until now, trust has always been provided by centralized authorities such as governments, banks, and companies. With Bitcoin, such an intermediary is no longer necessary. Bitcoin enables the provision of trust through its protocol instead. By decentralizing trust, applications for finance, business, governance, and society can all be transformed and be made more reliable, efficient, and secure, leading to more accessibility and greater opportunities for all. 

What’s Next?

Trust Machine’s founders say that Bitcoin should not be limited to serving as a passive store of value as it will never fulfill its potential by standing still. To that end, they aim to bring forward the vision of Stacks and transform Bitcoin into the most dominant ecosystem of DeFi applications in the blockchain industry. 

Going forward, the plan is to engage with more Bitcoin developers to build solutions that will enable Bitcoin holders to participate in the extremely promising but still infant DeFi industry. The team will expand on Stack’s programmable layer to make it faster and easier to build dApps, eventually rolling out new concepts like Bitcoin-based NFTs and trustless Bitcoin lending.