Unspendable Labs has announced Kontor, a new Bitcoin metaprotocol designed to introduce programmable assets and scalable file storage directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain. The announcement was made by Adam Krellenstein, founder of Unspendable Labs, during his keynote presentation at Bitcoin Amsterdam.
The Kontor project aims to address a significant gap in the Bitcoin ecosystem. While Bitcoin ETFs are seeing substantial investment and institutional adoption is growing, the infrastructure for programmable Bitcoin assets has not kept pace. Furthermore, the Bitcoin community remains divided on how to scale the network while adhering to its core principles.
Kontor's On-Chain Approach
Unlike Layer-2 solutions that move activity off-chain and potentially impact Bitcoin's economic stability, Kontor enhances Bitcoin's functionality by building directly on its foundation. Every Kontor transaction is a native Bitcoin transaction, fully secured by Bitcoin's hashpower. The protocol operates without validators, bridges, sequencers, or sidechains, with all logic executed on-chain. Kontor distinguishes itself from existing metaprotocols through its Sigil smart contract framework, a persistent file storage protocol, and carefully designed tokenomics.
Key Features of Kontor
Sigil Smart Contracts
Kontor empowers developers to write, deploy, and execute sophisticated smart contract applications directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. The Sigil framework leverages the new WebAssembly Component Model, simplifying the process of writing contracts for WebAssembly. It offers strong type safety, rich data types, native cross-contract calls, and an excellent developer experience, making contract development feel similar to writing standard software.
Perpetual File Storage
Kontor introduces a "pay-once, store-forever" model for file storage, secured by Bitcoin's hashpower. This approach ensures a high degree of data persistence without increasing the burden on the underlying blockchain. For Bitcoin users seeking an alternative to embedding file data directly in transactions—a practice that externalizes costs to the entire network and remains prohibitively expensive—Kontor provides an innovative solution that complements Bitcoin's inherent functionality and scales to meet user demand.
KOR Native Token
The economic model of Kontor was developed from the ground up to support data storage and smart contract execution. While maintaining BTC as its primary unit of account, Kontor smart contract execution results in the burning of KOR tokens. Bitcoin users can acquire KOR trustlessly through single-confirmation atomic swaps. KOR emissions are designed to incentivize perpetual data storage and adjust dynamically to maintain controlled inflation.
Developer Vision
"The time is past for science projects and proofs of concept. Bitcoin doesn’t need to be like Ethereum for it to grow and change," stated Adam Krellenstein, CEO of Unspendable Labs. "We’re bringing new functionality to Bitcoin without trying to turn it into something it isn’t.”
Development Status and Resources
Kontor is currently under active development, with support available for Bitcoin signet and testnet. A block explorer is accessible at kor.space. The Kontor Indexer codebase is fully open-source, and protocol documentation is hosted on the project website. Further information about Kontor can be found by following @kontornetwork on X.
About Unspendable Labs
Unspendable Labs is a blockchain technology company focused on pioneering Bitcoin-native infrastructure. In 2014, Unspendable Labs CEO Adam Krellenstein launched Counterparty, which introduced the first blockchain-based decentralized exchange, prediction markets, trustless gaming, and financial derivatives. Counterparty also supported early NFT collections such as Rare Pepes and Spells of Genesis. Unspendable Labs continues to support the open-source Counterparty reference implementation and operates Horizon Market and Horizon Wallet for the broader Bitcoin digital asset ecosystem.