The race to scale Bitcoin for mass adoption has produced a variety of projects, each tackling a piece of the puzzle. The Lightning Network focused on speed but created a user experience fraught with routing failures and complex liquidity management. Other solutions, like Liquid or Fedimint, simplify the user experience but do so by introducing custodial federations, trading away Bitcoin’s core value proposition of self-sovereignty for convenience.
Until now, no single project has offered a complete, full-stack solution that delivers speed, scalability, and true self-custody in one package.
ByteStream, a new Bitcoin-native protocol, is emerging as the first to bundle all the necessary components for a commercially-viable, non-custodial payment rail. Its “Anchored Taproot Ledger” design combines three key features that competitors only address in isolation.
First, it provides instant, channel-free merchant settlements. By using a shared off-chain ledger, it eliminates routing hops, allowing it to achieve sub-second payment latency with near-zero failure rates.
Second, it is fundamentally non-custodial. Each user retains full control of their funds via their own Taproot output on the Bitcoin mainchain, with a guaranteed, unilateral path to exit the system.
Third, it provides auditable, provable solvency by periodically anchoring a Merkle root of all balances to the Bitcoin blockchain.
This unique combination is precisely why major payment providers, who have so far been hesitant to dive deep into Bitcoin payments, would find ByteStream compelling from day one. For a provider like Square, the current landscape is problematic. The Lightning Network’s 10-20% routing failure rate is unacceptable for merchant services. Custodial solutions, meanwhile, introduce massive regulatory and counterparty risks.
ByteStream solves both problems. It offers payment service providers (PSPs) a reliable, high-throughput rail (targeting 500-1,000+ TPS) that just works, all while removing the provider from the chain of custody. With SDKs and REST APIs for integration, it’s designed as a “merchant-ready” settlement layer. Furthermore, its architecture includes roles for “Liquidity Nodes,” creating a dedicated market for instant cash-outs to the main blockchain, a feature critical for commercial operations.
While other projects have tried to fix one aspect of Bitcoin’s adoption problem, ByteStream is building the complete engine. As more users and liquidity providers join, the network effects of its pooled liquidity model will only strengthen its reliability and speed, making it a prime candidate to become the backbone for the next evolution of global Bitcoin commerce.
