An open letter from Bitflow
Is the future of Bitcoin Capital Markets Closed-Source?
Imagine the world’s biggest financial markets priced in BTC. The software behind them should be open to public scrutiny.
The question
Bitcoin offers separation of money and state, and has earned its place as a store of value. But many investors still have unanswered questions. How far can this asset and its network go beyond digital gold? We now have solutions for borrowing, lending, and even BTC yield. Could we ever see a global economy priced in BTC, and where would those markets live?
Today
Today, much of Bitcoin’s active financial life takes place inside institutions. Centralized exchanges and ETFs have brought access and liquidity to millions of people. That growth will continue alongside markets where people can participate without handing custody and control to an intermediary. Open source protocols on top of Bitcoin give institutions and independent builders infrastructure they can inspect and build upon. The resulting products can strengthen the investment thesis in BTC.
An example
A prime example is Stacks’ recent Bitcoin Staking upgrade, which enables BTC yield through self-custodial staking on Bitcoin L1. Demand has exceeded available capacity as the program puts more BTC capital to work. With permissionless direct participation planned for its next phase, this example shows how advances in open-source technology are pushing Bitcoin capital markets forward.
The machinery
Building permissionless trading markets around these advances takes more than open-source smart contracts. Makers need reliable data and tools to manage capital. Developers need infrastructure they can understand and extend. Traders need good execution. Keeping the machinery behind those markets closed makes participants dependent on its operator for changes and fixes, or leaves them rebuilding it themselves. Opening that machinery lets more people inspect, test and operate the systems those markets depend on.
Starting now
Bitflow is going open source.
Why
Our team wants to make it easier for developers and institutions to build and operate Bitcoin markets together, starting with the trading and liquidity infrastructure we’ve spent years developing on Stacks.
What opens
Our smart contracts are already live and visible, and our market maker starter kit is public. We’ll extend that work in phases to the app, backend, keeper automation system, custom node and the dependencies needed to operate them. Our custom node implementations have been a superpower for our developers: getting usable chain data has consumed a huge amount of effort, but that work has made better products possible. We’re excited to remove that friction for other builders and share what we’ve learned.
The network
A motivated army of builders, traders and makers will not magically appear. It grows when building together costs less than reinventing the wheel. Opening our work gives others a starting point, along with the ability to inspect it, question our decisions and take it somewhere we haven’t considered. We want more of the effort spent building Bitcoin DeFi to result in useful markets and products.
AI makes code abundant. Bitcoin remains scarce.
Competition
That choice will make it easier to compete with us. Success attracts more competition, which ultimately leads to better products. We intend to earn our position through our brand, the quality of our systems, the liquidity people can access, and the relationships we build with those using them. AI makes code abundant while Bitcoin remains scarce. Opening the infrastructure will help the network of builders, traders and makers grow well beyond what one team could build alone.
Each release
Each release will need preparation. The rollout will continue over the coming months and into 2027. Someone outside Bitflow should be able to understand what each system does, what it depends on, and what its limits are. We’ll publish technical documentation alongside the code and keep maintaining what we release, one layer at a time.
Security
Security will require ongoing work. Open code lets independent researchers and developers use increasingly capable models to look for weaknesses alongside us. Every new generation of models should prompt another serious look at the systems people are trusting with capital. We believe that, with continued audits and tested fixes, software hardened in public will become safer over time than closed-source alternatives.
The work
Our team will be working harder than ever to establish and maintain these repos and services for a motivated army of developers, traders, and market makers aligned with Bitcoin’s success. Trading activity on Bitflow hit all time highs in 2026, generating protocol revenue that has been reinvested in our infrastructure and AI harnesses so we can review changes thoroughly and respond to issues quickly.
The opportunity
Together, this is how we intend to build an open operating network for Bitcoin markets, where developers and institutions can inspect, improve and operate the infrastructure themselves. The opportunity extends beyond the products we run today: more tokenized assets, better tools for makers and lenders, ways for agents to move capital, and room for products nobody here has imagined yet.
Durable
Nobody owns the Bitcoin network. We want our work to become useful enough, and durable enough, to live on much longer than us, ideally as long as Bitcoin itself.
Start here
Join us and the BFF army on this mission to create widely adopted, open, and permissionless Bitcoin capital markets. Consider running a local simulation with the public market maker starter kit. Explore how it works. Contribute a fix, build a strategy in private, or make it your own.
Time is one thing nobody can mine
Time is money
Bitcoin
Bitcoin’s story does not end at digital gold, and its capital markets will be powered by open-source, permissionless networks.
Bitflow
Start with the market maker kit →