The VerifiedX foundation has announced the launch of vBTC.b on Base with support for Fireblocks, aimed at bringing Bitcoin’s digital gold qualities and world-class brand recognition to Defi and the Institutional self-custody markets.
According to a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine, VerifiedX is the first “Non-Synthetic Bitcoin Asset” with built-in native bitcoin redemption, compatible with Base, Coinbase’s increasingly popular EVM blockchain and Defi platform. “vBTC is now live as a canonical asset on Base under the ticker vBTC.b and is officially listed inside the Fireblocks platform with self-custody enabled.”
While the integration with Base makes vBTC available to the public. The integration with Fireblocks unlocks institutional interest, as Fireblocks is a leading institutional digital asset custodian and a powerful brand in the Western market.
According to DefiLlama, the Defi market today holds over 80 billion in value. While Bitcoin remains the king of the crypto markets, its representation in Defi remains small; only 5 billion worth of value is held in Bitcoin across the broader crypto-defi ecosystem, while Ethereum holds over 43 billion of the same.
VerifiedX believes there is strong demand for Bitcoin inside Defi, with institutions increasingly interested in self-custody solutions that can satisfy their needs for regulatory compliance as well as privacy from onchain analysis and front running. VerifiedX has been designed around these expectations, while innovating beyond traditional bridges, synthetic bitcoin wrappers and trusted federations.
Their novel approach leverages a large open network of FROST multiparty computation (MCP) nodes that arguably set a new standard for cross-chain technologies. The VerifiedX tech stack has received “an institutional full-stack audit via Halborn.”
Bitcoiners can expect enhanced integration with Defi rails from vBTC, with new utility such as “programmable settlement, collateralized borrowing, yield strategies, and AI-agent commerce” among other potential features, while leveraging a far more decentralized and self-custody oriented cross-chain technology than has been available to date. The VerifiedX chain also has zero-knowledge proof technology built in natively, providing a privacy benefit to its users as they move BTC in and out of the system, shielding them from onchain analytics.
FROST Multi-Party Computation and Self-Custody
The VerifiedX network leverages breakthroughs in cryptography built around Bitcoin’s taproot upgrade. Each VerifiedX validator runs a FROST multi-party computation (MCP) server, a sophisticated and scalable form of Shamir secret sharing developed independently of VerifiedX.
FROST, which stands for “Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures,” unlocks a technology similar to multi-signature addresses in Bitcoin, but without leaving an obvious onchain footprint. FROST-generated addresses are cryptographically indistinguishable from other taproot addresses, providing significant privacy benefits.
But the real value of FROST is its threshold signature technology, which allows party members to easily add and remove key shares (shards) to the group (as long as a majority agrees), without having to do on-chain transactions. Keeping the related computation off-chain allows a lot more parties to participate in the security scheme than previously possible, while keeping costs low and leaving no on-chain footprint on Bitcoin. When more than the threshold of shards are used in this MCP process, a valid Bitcoin transaction can be assembled.
New members can join the public VerifiedX network as validators at any time, though they must jump through a few hoops. Users would need to sign a variety of transactions on the VerifiedX blockchain and need to hold 5000 VFX, the native asset of this blockchain. Once the right onchain transactions are signed, the network welcomes the new validator and their corresponding shard, growing the number of parties needed to pass the threshold. The result is a dynamic and large multi-signature bitcoin wallet that avoids corporate federated whitelists or small high-trust custodians. If members remove their 5000 VFX from the address, their node is removed from the active validators, and the FROST scheme adjusts accordingly.
It’s important to note that while it is a breakthrough in decentralization, this public network scheme does not pass the technical definition of on-chain self-custody, since it does not give Bitcoin holders unilateral withdrawal rights to the underlying Bitcoin. If, for some catastrophic reason, the whole VerifiedX public FROST pool went offline, holders of vBTC would be unable to redeem their bitcoin. However, the scheme is arguably far more decentralized than current alternatives, often relying on simple single-digit multisignature addresses, synthetic bitcoin tokens backed by altcoins or trusted federations. In the current bootstrap phase, there are over 100 active validators, and the number can technically go up well over an order of magnitude.
The VerifiedX tech does, however, open the door for a self-custodied path from Bitcoin to Defi. According to Jay Pollak — Head of Strategy and Business Development at the VerifiedX Foundation — the VerifiedX protocol can allow users to set up their own “self-sovereign smart contracts” with shards and the corresponding smart contract that mints 1:1 collateralized vBTC 100% under their control, though this specific capability will be announced in more detail and made easier in upcoming updates. Such a ‘self-sovereign smart contract’ setup would arguably pass the self-custody standard, unlocking a direct path from onchain Bitcoin to the Defi ecosystem under the same vBTC ticker.
The VFX Governance Token
VFX, the governance token of the VerifiedX blockchain, is a critical security component of the whole equation, especially for the public FROST pool. Some kind of cost needs to be imposed on new validators to prevent a swarm of fake accounts from overwhelming the network. To that end, the current implementation of the protocol demands 5000 VFX coins to be held by validators. However, according to Pollak, this number is very likely to go down soon.
The value of VFX has seen a sharp rise since January 2025, though Pollak points out that Bitmart is the only exchange that lists it, and better price discovery will come as it enters bigger markets and more liquidity is made available. He was adamant that VFX is a governance token and has no interest in competing with Bitcoin in any way. Today, VFX trades at about $69, making the cost of being a validator quite high, though Pollak also said the amount of VFX required was very likely to change to a much lower amount soon, making the self-sovereign smart contract self-custody path far more accessible.
200 million units of VFX were minted in 2023 during the founding of the protocol, with 67.5 million going to the VerifiedX foundation and the rest being mined for active participation and in the test network. Today, the foundation holds about 32.3 million VFX coins. According to Pollak, the current lifetime supply of VFX is approximately 169.9 million, with the remaining 30 million effectively burned in the early days for security reasons. The circulating supply is much smaller, he added, as the testnet era mints are constrained and can only move small amounts at a time, “subject to an on-chain unlocking schedule, limiting sales to no more than the burn rate per block.”
Bitcoin Magazine has a financial relationship with The VerifiedX Foundation. This article was not commissioned or reviewed by The VerifiedX Foundation and reflects the independent judgment of the author.
