Bitcoin Just Beamed to Cardano — No Bridges, No Wrapping, No Trust Required

Peter (00:00.418)
Alright everyone, something wild has just happened. While everyone’s arguing about price action, ETFs and all these other things that’s happening in this space, a team just sent real Bitcoin to the Cardano blockchain and it arrived as a Cardano native token. No bridges, no wrapped assets, no custodians sitting in the middle holding onto your funds, just pure trustless, zero knowledge cryptography.

The protocol is called Charms and on March 18th they beamed Enchanted Bitcoin or eBTC from the Bitcoin blockchain to Cardano and a few weeks before that they sent ADA, SNEK and USDM from Cardano over to Bitcoin. Today I’m going to break down exactly how this works and why Cardano’s eUTXO model made this possible and why this could be the beginning of the end of every bridge in crypto.

Stay with me here. Let’s go into the details. Hi everyone. I’m Peter. If this is first time here, hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell. I talk all things crypto, Cardano and of course, Midnight as well. I’m a Cardano ambassador and a Midnight ambassador and I love keeping you guys up to date with everything that’s happening in the ecosystem. So let’s get into the details here. So we have the details from the Charms team around the first Bitcoin and Cardano

being united by Charms. So first, what is Charms? Charms is a programmable asset protocol built by the team at Charms Inc and BitcoinOS. The lead developer, Ivan along with Gadi and Andrew have put together this protocol to make things really exciting for Bitcoin DeFi. And here is what makes it so special. Charms allows you to create programmable tokens, fungible tokens, NFTs.

and even full decentralized apps directly on top of Bitcoin’s UTXO layer. Think of it as giving Bitcoin smart contract powers without actually changing Bitcoin itself. And this has been one of the struggles in the Bitcoin ecosystem. People haven’t wanted to change Bitcoin to make it smart contract enabled. So teams are building on top of it to make this all possible. But the really mind blowing part is that the assets aren’t stuck on Bitcoin. They can be beamed.

Peter (02:25.262)
That’s the actual term they use to other UTXO blockchains. And the first chain they integrated with is Cardano. Now this is what you need to understand. It’s not a bridge with traditional bridges. The asset gets locked into a smart contract on one chain and a wrapped version gets minted on the other chain. That’s where we get things like wrapped Bitcoin or wrapped Ethereum and all of that stuff. And remember that Nomad bridge hack where

the EVM contracts were hacked and all the underlying assets that supported the wrapped assets were withdrawn and sold. And those wrapped assets were essentially all useless after that. So these bridges, they’re a honeypot for the hackers. It’s a concentrated centralized place where hackers can focus their efforts. And because there is a big pool of locked assets, it’s just sitting there as a sitting target. So the bridge is not ideal.

I know there are many bridges out there have flawless track records, but they’ve always had that type of risk and that type of negativity to them because of that potential potential hack. Now, Charms works completely differently here. It uses something called recursive zero knowledge proofs. So instead of trusting a bridge and a validator set, every single client, even a mobile app or web browser can verify for itself

that the asset transferred is legitimate. It’s a cryptographic proof, not trust. So we’re relying on the code here to prove that it has moved. Your assets aren’t locked anywhere and they materialize natively on the destination chain. And here’s the part that makes me smile as a Cardano ambassador. The white paper explicitly credits Cardano as the first key technology that informed the creation of Charms.

Our UTXO model or eUTXO model, extended UTXO, was the inspiration for the entire data model. So Bitcoin, Cardano, the UTXBros finally connected. So let’s look into the demo here and the receipts essentially of what has happened. Now I’ve opened up a few of these transactions, but we can see the Bro token from Charms being transferred over to the Cardano ecosystem.

Peter (04:46.798)
So each one of these tabs here I have open is a link to the transactions. This is the first one on Charms, sending over the Bro token to Cardano and we can see the resulting transaction coming in as well. Now it’s a little bit hard to see on some of these transaction explorers, but I’ve got Cardano Scan here open that shows it a little bit better. And we can see here, this wallet address received the Bro token at this particular date.

And you can see the reference inputs of where it’s all coming from as well with the collateral and everything else around it. This is a script transfer that made this all possible here. And we can also see other transactions here that they’ve put through. This is sending back the Bro token back to the Charms chain, the Bitcoin side of things. And we can again see this on Cardano Scan a little bit clearer and with more visibility to see exactly what’s happening. They sent back zero point.

0000001 Bro and a bit of eBTC, which I believe might have been the fee. I don’t have clarity around that, but that might be the case there. Now we can also see this coming back as a confirmation. You can see the highlighted amount of Bro that was sent back to the Bitcoin chain there. So overall really cool stuff. They do have a lot of other transactions, hashes here for

the other transfers that they did, including the Cardano native token transfer. So that was the sending of ADA, SNEK and USDM from Cardano to Bitcoin. And also the other ones here, they’ve got the full workflow of it going back and forth too. So they’ve done this a couple of times now and it’s pretty exciting to see. So if you haven’t followed the team yet, check out their X profiles here. We do have Ivan, we have Andrew here and we have

Sam that have been working on this. There’s other developers, of course, a part of the team and the developers that did write the white paper as well. So I highly encourage you to check all of those details out. So you can learn a little bit more about this and thank the people that have actually put in the hard work to make this all happen. Connecting Bitcoin and Cardano together to make Bitcoin DeFi all possible. Now, if we want to get into a little bit more of the technical sides, this is actually how it all works. Okay. So.

Peter (07:11.256)
For some of you, you’re thinking, Pete, this sounds amazing, but how on earth does this actually work without a bridge? So let me break it down for you in English here, plain, simple English. Step one on the destination chain. Let’s say, Cardano, you create a placeholder. Think of it as an empty parking spot with a reserve sign on it. And it’s waiting for an asset to arrive. On the source chain, Bitcoin, you create a transaction that includes what Charms calls

a spell. This spell contains zero knowledge proof that says this asset is being moved to that exact place on the Cardano side. That asset effectively disappears from Bitcoin. Step 3 on Cardano, a transaction references the original Bitcoin spell. It proves using ZK proofs and a Bitcoin Merkle proof that the Bitcoin transaction actually happened and was confirmed. Once verified,

assets materialize on Cardano as a native token. The beauty of this is that neither chain needs to know about the other. Bitcoin doesn’t know Cardano exists. Cardano doesn’t talk to Bitcoin. All verification happens on the client side using cryptographic proofs. That’s why it’s called beaming like a Star Trek beaming or transport beaming thing. Well, teleport it. That’s it.

The assets disappear from one place and fully materialize in another. And because it uses recursive ZK proofs, you don’t need to traverse the entire transaction history. One proof verification tells you everything you need to know. Even a browser or mobile app can do it. So no indexes, no special infrastructure, just the blockchain and the proof. Now, why was Cardano first? And this is the part that you really want to hear.

Charms didn’t just randomly pick Cardano as its first integration. The white paper is very clear about this. They say, and I’m paraphrasing here, that Cardano was the first key technology that informed the creation of Charms. Why? Because Cardano pioneered the extended UTXO model. Bitcoin has basic UTXO model. You spend inputs and it creates outputs. Cardano took that and said, what if those outputs could hold multiple assets?

Peter (09:36.61)
Carrying arbitrary data and be governed by smart contract logic. That’s eUTXO. Charms took that concept even further into what they called Enchanted UTXO, but the foundation, the DNA, it’s Cardano innovation. And here’s the other key thing. Cardano’s blockchain natively supports BLS12-381, the curve verification. That elliptic curve used

for the Groth16 ZK proofs that Charms relies on. So Charms tokens can exist on Cardano as native, as actual native tokens, not just wrapped or bridged assets, but native. Minted when they beam in, burned when they beam out, all governed by Cardano’s own ledger rules. UTXO Brotherhood is real and Cardano is the launchpad. Now let’s zoom out because Charms doesn’t exist in isolation.

Look at what’s happening in Cardano in 2026. We’ve got Layer Zero connecting us to 80 other blockchains for cross-chain interoperability. We have USDCX for institutional grade stablecoin liquidity with privacy coming in. We have Pyth, the tier one Oracle for data feeds. We have Midnight for privacy and compliance. And we have Leios for scaling up to 10,000 transactions per second.

ADA classified as a digital commodity by the SEC and CFTC and now Charms giving us trustless, bridgeless connection directly to Bitcoin and the biggest liquidity pool in all of crypto. So think about what that means for Cardano DeFi with eBTC as a native token, Bitcoin holders can now participate in the Cardano DeFi ecosystem.

They can trade on DEXs like Delta DeFi running on Hydra, on MinSwap, on SundaySwap, on C-Swap, all of these DEXs out there on the Cardano ecosystem that have been building up the DeFi landscape for such a long time. We have a very diverse ecosystem. They can now provide liquidity. They can interact with lending protocols. They can connect with perpetuals. The list is endless here.

Peter (11:56.072)
All without ever trusting a bridge. And this goes both ways. So Cardano tokens can be beamed to Bitcoin, reaching the Bitcoin community and their capital. So that whole liquidity island narrative, it’s not just dying, it’s dead. Between Layer Zero, USDCX and now Charms, Cardano is becoming one of the most connected ecosystems in all of crypto. The white paper even says it, by bootstrapping Charms on Cardano’s dApp ecosystem,

we empower the developers to build freely with Cardano projects becoming the first to explore this new programmable frontier as the rest of crypto industry collapses inwards towards Bitcoin’s gravity. Cardano becomes the launchpad. Now I just want to bring your attention to this post here that Andrew put up. Reminder that getting Bitcoin and Cardano connected with Charms was just the prologue. Now

we all need to build Charms apps on both chains that Bitcoiners start using. We kick it off with Cast, be it alive tomorrow, trade Bro, the first charm on Bitcoin. Amazing stuff. Links down below here. You can look at cast.charms.dev. This is the website here launching tomorrow where you’ll be able to do the very first trades. I’m going to give it a go myself to see what the experience is like and explain it to you guys.

But this is where we’re at now. That developers can start building on all of this and start connecting the ecosystem together. So really exciting stuff. Now in other news, we do have some really exciting developments. We do have the Pyth hackathon. I did talk about Pyth in previous episodes as well. This is the Oracle data layer that is connecting to the Cardano ecosystem. We have more than a hundred developers, some of the best in the Cardano ecosystem working

on all of these deep connections. 23 teams completed the hackathon with amazing ideas. I’m going to follow up and try and find out what those ideas were. Winners will be announced this week. Stay tuned. Builder Fest loading. So this is Builder Fest starting right after this hackathon and check this photo out. We do have quite a few developers in the house. They’re all working on some amazing stuff there. So awesome. Thank you Angus for posting up that, that,

Peter (14:18.616)
those pictures as well. Thank you very much. We also have Strike. Now last week, last Friday, Strike launched with a flawless launch. This is the perpetuals platform on the Cardano ecosystem. And they now have Cardano and Ethereum support. And they also are pushing towards Solana as well. Let me read you some of the highlights here. Mainnet launch went nearly perfect. The entire trading engine is working as expected. We’ll now begin the next phase.

of our rollout where we continuously increase max position sizes and begin adding new assets. Max position sizes has just been increased from $100 to $500. New assets being added later this weekend. Right now you can trade BTC with up to 25x leverage. We have already surpassed 10,000 in volume and 600 successful trades. Thank you everyone for the support. The next update will be announced soon.

And they continue today with this update. So four days ago, they launched. Next things that are coming: mobile native mobile app, codes so that anyone can build on top of us and earn money. Really cool. Allowing anyone to create their own perpetuals market using our backend. Trading competitions, wallet trackers. You can view top trader positions and follow them. Solana wallet integration, trailing stop losses.

TWAP orders. I’m not too sure if that was a typo. I’m not sure what that is. More advanced order types, more UI/UX improvements and listing of more assets. So these guys are absolutely killing it. And you can see it in the charts here. They’re doing phenomenally well. The last thing I want to mention here is this is the Midnight blockchain launch week. Midnight Network is going live this week with a curated list

of validators that will be starting up the network. This is a little bit of a preview thing here. It’s all in binary, but this essentially says, are you ready? And yes, I think most of us are ready for this particular launch. Pretty excited about it all. We are launching the chain with WorldPay, Bullish, Google Cloud, MoneyGram, eToro, Web3, PairPoint, PairPoint by Vodafone. We have Telegram with Alphaton. We have Shielded Labs and Blockdaemon.

Peter (16:45.046)
I don’t think they’ve announced their final, final node validator yet. I think there’s still one more. Haven’t seen that last one yet, but they’ll launch it with 10. We do know nine of them. Pretty exciting stuff. If you haven’t checked out this video yet, I’ll leave a link down below for you guys. Very, very exciting to see this blockchain launch. We’ve seen a lot of activity around Midnight and I’m pretty excited about it. So if you want to check out more and learn more, I have been listening to the

podcast that the Midnight team have relaunched called Unshielded. And one of the latest episodes here is with Lucas Kossovy. He is in charge of open source product and growth at Open Zeppelin. Open Zeppelin is one of the very early adopters of smart contract tech back in, I think it was 2017 or 2015, somewhere around there when they first started and created Open Zeppelin. And these guys have

set the standard for smart contracts on EVM. And so many projects use their smart contracts that have been verified and move a massive amount of liquidity through their contracts. This is an estimate value of how much has gone through the contracts that the Open Zeppelin team have been putting together. And listening in on this podcast episode here, they have been working with the Midnight team for the last year on

putting out smart contracts for developers that are building on top of Midnight. If anything, that really develops that developer experience, really enhances that developer experience. So people that are coming into Midnight and are wondering what contracts can I use? How can I do a swap? How can I do staking contracts? What’s good out there that has already been built and tested? There we go. Check out these smart contracts that were built by the Open Zeppelin team and that

clicks with a lot of people because if they’re already building in the EVM space, they say, okay, my first default point of call would be the Open Zeppelin contracts. Great. You have a whole suite of them for Midnight. I’ll just start there and I’ll start building that way. So amazing stuff. Very smart move from the Midnight team for doing stuff like that. And I’m overall very excited about the launch. If you want to be informed and keep up to date with everything that’s happening in this space, learn more about the Midnight launch.

Peter (19:09.388)
Learn more about Charms, Bitcoin DeFi, all that stuff that’s super exciting at the moment. Make sure you hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe, notification bell on your way out. If you want to support the channel, I’ve got there, buy me a coffee. You can also become a YouTube member down below. I’ve got quite a few members now and I’m so appreciative of all the people that have been supporting the work. Check out the list of members here on the screen. There you go. Quite a few of them. So.

Thank you so much for doing that. You don’t have to support me monetarily if you can’t. A like, subscribe, comments down below does wonders for the YouTube algorithm and gets this video out there. So really appreciate that as well. So guys, it’s going to be a big week. Stay optimistic and I’ll see you guys in the next video.