by Jascha Samadi – October 29, 2025

Throughout history, stores of value earned trust by being useful first – land fed people, cattle worked fields, gold enabled trade. Bitcoin, worth over $2.2T, has value but little utility. BitcoinOS (BOS) changes that, making bitcoin programmable, productive, and connected to real economic activity. We’re excited to have led their $10M strategic raise, which was announced last week ahead. With $BOS now listed on major exchanges including Binance and Kraken a new chapter begins – one where bitcoin finally works for the world, not just waits.

Across civilizations, societies have trusted and priced their wealth in assets with clear, tangible utility. A good store of value is any asset that preserves purchasing power over time. In monetary terms, it complements money’s other roles as medium of exchange and unit of account. Crucially, enduring stores of value have never been purely symbolic. They were initially useful, then widely accepted, and ultimately widely trusted. People could live on them, eat them, wear them, or put them to work.

Land perfectly exemplifies this pattern. Its scarcity and essential uses (shelter, agriculture) have made it a foundation of wealth for millennia. In societies from antiquity to the modern era – including 18th – 19th century Britain, where agricultural land comprised a large share of national wealth – land ownership anchored family fortunes and political power. Land’s direct productivity (food, rents, habitation) made it both wealth and a generator of wealth.  Cattle played a similar role throughout history. Herds functioned as mobile savings that could reproduce, feed families, and settle large obligations. They were bartered and, in many settings, served as a unit of account. Even the English language remembers this: pecuniary traces back to pecus (cattle), a reminder that livestock once defined wealth. As with land, the monetary role grew out of obvious, life-sustaining utility combined with scarcity and (re-)productivity.

Agrarian societies extended the pattern with staple crops such as rice and grain. In feudal Japan, rice circulated widely as a settlement medium. Similar dynamics appeared across Southeast Asia and even colonial America. While perishability and storage logistics constrained their range, staples were so central to production that they could function locally as both value and money. Precious metals on the other hand, especially gold, entered through a blend of physical properties and cultural valuation. Gold is scarce, durable, divisible, and portable. It does not corrode and retains luster, which made it widely adopted long before coinage. The pivotal innovation was standardization: beginning around the 6th century BCE (e.g., Lydia’s stamped coins), official weights and seals transformed metal from ornament and tribute into circulating currency. Standardization and state certification reduced transaction frictions, broadened acceptance, and helped gold earn its reputation as a safe-haven asset during stress.

Other objects with recognized, durable value filled similar roles in different regions. Cowrie shells – prized for beauty and resilience – circulated as money in parts of China by 1200 BCE and were still widely used across West Africa by the 14th century. Their monetary life, like that of metals and staples, rested on a base of social recognition and practical exchangeability.

As commerce and trade capacity grew, economies shifted from moving value in bulk to moving claims on value. Paper instruments arose as portable representations of stored commodities and metals, letting traders and governments separate settlement from the physical object. By the 19th century, formal metallic standards (e.g., the UK’s 1816 gold standard) anchored paper currencies in redeemability: trust in notes rested on the ability to swap them for a fixed weight of metal. Through the early 20th century, leading currencies remained tied – directly or indirectly – to gold or silver, even as everyday transactions increasingly relied on paper and banking systems. This redeemability was its core utility which made paper money widely adopted and thus trusted.

The 20th century then witnessed a decisive institutional turn. Wars and depressions prompted suspensions of convertibility as governments prioritized liquidity and macro stability. After World War II, the Bretton Woods framework pegged major currencies to the US dollar, itself convertible to gold for official holders. In 1971, the final link was severed when dollar-to-gold convertibility ended. The result was a fully fiat regime, in which store-of-value performance depends on credible and responsible monetary and fiscal management rather than redemption against a commodity. But even in the case of fiat money as a means for people to store wealth, one could argue that there is a primary use case and a utility: the fact that it is broadly accepted as a medium of exchange and embedded in global payment systems. This has created the network effects that earned it widespread adoption and thus widespread trust. But in times when that very credibility of monetary policy is questioned, savers diversify into alternative stores of value.

Bitcoin’s utility

Against this backdrop, BTC aspires to join the lineage of stores of value. It exhibits engineered scarcity and global transferability, but – by the argument advanced here – it has yet to replicate historical patterns and find a widely adopted primary utility beyond passive holding.

Unlike commodities or land, a BTC can’t be consumed, worn, or inhabited – it produces no yield and has no physical use. Its core “digital gold” narrative rests on self-referential claims: BTC is prized because it’s scarce. Meanwhile, its original promise as a peer-to-peer medium of exchange has been largely sidelined. By deliberate design, Bitcoin’s base layer remains constrained (small blocks, 10-minute confirmations, high fees), rendering everyday transactions cumbersome and expensive. In practice, it’s rarely used for payments, and some critics argue that its market value floats on pure speculation – a faith that others will value it tomorrow because others value it today.

Yet despite these doubts, BTC has a compelling but rather theoretical utility. It allows for censorship-resistant, sovereign, borderless value transfer – a digital bearer asset beyond the reach of any state. Bitcoin’s decentralized design ensures that no bank or government can arbitrarily seize funds or block a valid transaction. This makes it a lifeline for those facing capital controls or asset seizures, from people fleeing oppressive regimes to investors hedging against financial censorship. Today’s on-chain reality, however, reveals a paradox between this theoretical ideal and how it’s actually held. Roughly 40% of all BTC now sits in third-party custody, from exchanges and ETFs to corporate treasuries. This number significantly increases even further, once you take the millions of bitcoins (estimates range from 3 to 4 million) into account, which are likely lost forever due to forgotten keys, and effectively removed from circulation. In other words, a significant share of BTC supply sits under institutional and centralized oversight within regulated custodial channels, making its censorship-resistant ethos obsolete. 

That said, BTC is still searching for a primary utility – we believe that is why it needs to be programmable to evolve from a static store of value into a productive asset. To mature from static savings technology into a resilient, broadly trusted asset, BTC must be programmable in ways that make it economically productive – supporting uses such as collateralization, settlement, or other yield-generating and transactional roles that connect it to real economic activity. Lessons from millennia of monetary practice have demonstrated, assets that reliably store value are those that do valuable work first.

Enter BitcoinOS

Today, BTC is a $2.2T asset. Only a fraction of that is utilized in DeFi through wrapped versions of BTC that come under very different trust assumptions and clear counterparty risk. BitcoinOS is here to change that and unlock a massive design space and $2.2T worth of BTC liquidity. The team around co-founders Yago and Elan has achieved technological breakthroughs in the use of zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs that allow embedding any computation directly into Bitcoin transactions without changing the base protocol. This allows for a shared infrastructure layer and true Bitcoin L2s that offer L1 security, trustless bridging, scalability, and fully programmable tokens on Bitcoin.

The BOS team has further demonstrated this in a series of significant technological innovations, highlights include an industry-first bridgeless cross-chain asset transfer, and the launch of Charms, the first protocol for programmable tokens on Bitcoin. Charms is essentially a universal token standard for BTC, extending Bitcoin’s UTXO model by attaching app-specific data (validated through ZK proofs) to transactions. In doing so, it enables a host of capabilities previously foreign to Bitcoin’s base layer – fungible tokens, NFTs, lending markets, decentralized exchanges, and more – all secured by Bitcoin’s network without sacrificing decentralization. BOS has also integrated with multiple ecosystems, notably Cardano, Ethereum and Litecoin, to enable trustless bitcoin bridging. Assets created with Charms remain native to Bitcoin yet are portable and composable across chains, eliminating the need for wrapped tokens or fragile third-party bridges. Their state is enforced by recursive zk-proofs, allowing value to materialize on other chains with no custodians and no trust trade-offs. 

Most recently, BOS introduced Grail Pro, an institutional-grade protocol that allows institutional BTC yield generation while retaining self-custody. This is currently in a pilot with key institutions and custodians, aiming to unlock institutional BTC securely. With institutions increasingly adding BTC to their treasuries, Grail Pro lets major custodians mint a 1:1 BTC-backed token (zkBTC) directly from their cold storage, and deploy those tokens into trading, lending, and yield-generating strategies without relinquishing control of the underlying coins. Custodians themselves operate the system and maintain full control over their BTC even as that BTC is represented in decentralized markets. Unlike earlier wrapped-BTC solutions, which depended on trusting a third-party custodian or federated sidechain, zkBTC uses a trust-minimized architecture – it is backed by native BTC held in institutional custody and continuously validated on Bitcoin’s network via ZK proofs, removing the need to trust any intermediary. Once minted, zkBTC tokens adhere to the Charms standard, meaning they are interoperable across chains and smart contracts – they can flow into Ethereum, Cardano, or other networks’ DeFi platforms without bridges, all while remaining verifiably backed 1:1 by BTC. For institutional holders, the benefits are manifold: regulatory compliance and oversight (through features like customized vault rules and real-time monitoring of funds), composability with the broader crypto ecosystem, and actual yield generation on what were previously idle BTC reserves. In effect, Grail Pro unlocks BTC’s latent utility for banks, corporations, and custodians by turning cold storage assets into active capital. In tandem with Charms, we believe Grail Pro builds the infrastructure for Bitcoin’s next chapter, one where the old paradigm of inert “digital gold” gives way to an active role at the heart of DeFi.

$BOS listing on Binance

We are extremely excited to have had the opportunity to team up with Yago and Elan again, 5 years after we led the seed round of Sovryn, the first Bitcoin-native DeFi protocol that they launched prior to working on BOS. We recently led BOS’s $10M strategic funding round, which we announced last week. Today the $BOS token was listed on Binance (Alpha), Bitget, Kraken, Gate, Kucoin and MEXC. 

If you want to find out more about BitcoinOS you can visit their website or follow them on X. If you are building something natively tied to Bitcoin, please reach out to us.