Pocket Protocol

Pocket Protocol is a Bitcoin-native cross-chain liquidity platform designed to make Bitcoin truly usable in decentralized finance across multiple chains. It allows users to swap, bridge, and stake Bitcoin or tokenized equivalents (like rBTC or bridged BTC) across Rootstock, Core, and Citrea in a single, seamless workflow, removing the friction and complexity typically associated with DeFi.

At its core, Pocket Protocol leverages Rootstock’s rBTC, a programmable Bitcoin representation on an EVM-compatible sidechain, enabling trust-minimized smart contracts for routing, swapping, and staking. Users deposit assets on Rootstock, Core, or Citrea, and the protocol handles all necessary swaps to target tokens, locks the assets in the router contract, and emits canonical transfer events containing metadata like destination chain, token type, amount, and user address.

An off-chain relayer network monitors these events and submits proofs to the target chain, where counterpart contracts validate the proof and mint or release the corresponding wrapped token. Once the asset reaches the destination, Pocket can automatically deposit it into pre-selected liquidity pools, vaults, or yield protocols according to user preferences. The system supports both fully on-chain execution and off-chain transaction signing for enhanced UX and security flexibility.

By supporting Rootstock, Core, and Citrea, Pocket Protocol creates a Bitcoin-first liquidity layer across multiple ecosystems, enabling users to move Bitcoin seamlessly while keeping its identity intact. The protocol preserves the Bitcoin narrative (BTC → rBTC → bridged BTC) while unlocking DeFi opportunities, allowing holders to participate in staking, lending, and yield farming without leaving the security and stability of the Bitcoin universe.

Its event-driven architecture ensures a transparent, auditable record of cross-chain transfers, and its modular design allows integration with various relayer networks or third-party messaging layers like Hyperlane, Li.Fi, or Wormhole. This combination of security, usability, and multi-chain flexibility makes Pocket Protocol a hackathon-ready, production-scalable platform for Bitcoin DeFi

Pocket Protocol is built as a modular, event-driven cross-chain router with a focus on simplicity and security, leveraging the lock-and-burn mechanism as its foundational bridging method. At the core, the system uses a router smart contract on Rootstock, written in Solidity, which securely accepts deposits of rBTC, BTC-backed stablecoins, or other tokenized BTC equivalents. When a user deposits, the router either locks the asset (on the source chain) or burns it if the mechanism requires supply reduction, and emits a canonical event containing metadata such as the token type, destination chain, amount, and recipient address.

The emitted events are designed to be read by off-chain relayers, which can be permissioned fleets, decentralized nodes, or eventually integrated third-party messaging protocols like Hyperlane, Li.Fi, or Wormhole. These relayers listen for transfer requests and, upon verification, trigger the minting or release of wrapped assets on the destination chain (Rootstock, Core, or Citrea). For now, the system primarily relies on lock-and-burn flows, which are simple, secure, and hackathon-friendly, while the relayer architecture is being designed for future scalability and composability.

Technically, the project is pieced together with Solidity smart contracts, Ethers.js for interaction, Hardhat for development/testing, and canonical event logs for cross-chain messaging. Using Rootstock as the base layer brings PoW-backed security and EVM compatibility, which allows the project to leverage well-established tooling while remaining Bitcoin-native. On the bridging side, the modular architecture ensures that future integrations with relayer networks or other messaging protocols can be added without rewriting core logic.

A particularly notable hack is how the event-driven router acts as a single source of truth: by emitting canonical events at the moment of lock/burn, it reduces the need for complex off-chain coordination while keeping the flow auditable and trust-minimized. This design choice allows Pocket Protocol to function as a minimal, hackathon-ready prototype while remaining flexible for more sophisticated cross-chain architectures in the future.