Interlay serves as a modular, programmable interface between Bitcoin and the multi-chain ecosystem, facilitating decentralized financial use cases for BTC. Interlay’s vision is to promote mass adoption of Bitcoin by enabling decentralized financial use cases for BTC and eliminating the reliance on centralized services. This vision is realized by developing the requisite infrastructure and financial tools for both users and developers: * **DeFi for Bitcoin**: Interlay’s DeFi hub functions as a comprehensive platform for decentralized Bitcoin finance, offering BTC swaps, lending, and staking. With high throughput and low fees payable in any asset, alongside native stablecoin integrations, it aims to offer an experience competitive with centralized services. * **Bitcoin for DeFi**: Interlay’s BTC bridge represents a secure method of utilizing Bitcoin within the multi-chain ecosystem. iBTC, an asset backed 1:1 by BTC, is safeguarded by a decentralized network of vaults. BTC deposits are protected by a multi-collateral system and secured through cross-chain light clients. * **Building Bitcoin dApps**: Interlay plans to support the development of Bitcoin dApps on its modular network. The primary functions of the INTR governance and utility token are: * **Stake-to-vote**: Lock INTR to engage in governance and earn staking rewards. The longer the lock, the greater the voting power and staking rewards. * **Utility**: Transaction and cross-chain fees can be paid using INTR. * **Collateral**: INTR may be used as one of the collaterals to support iBTC and other Interlay assets. * **Outlook**: Product benefits: In the future, INTR may provide additional security and product advantages for stakers, such as improved liquidation and collateral rates, or reduced swap fees. The Interlay network was launched on March 11, 2022. For detailed information, visit Eulerpool.

INTR has an unlimited supply, with the emission schedule defined as follows: * 1 billion (1,000,000,000) INTR will be emitted over the first four years. * Following that, a 2% annual inflation rate will be applied, with funds allocated to the protocol treasury to support future development and maintenance. The supply distribution is as follows: 70% is allocated to the community through airdrops and block rewards. Specifically, 30% goes to Vault rewards, 5% to governance staking rewards ("stake-to-vote"), and 35% to the on-chain treasury, which is managed by network governance (including 10% airdropped during the first crowdloan). Additionally, 10% is reserved for network development and community and ecosystem building efforts. The remaining 20% is airdropped to the team and early backers, both current and future, who funded the initial development phase. For more detailed information, you can find INTR on Eulerpool.

Interlay was established by Alexei Zamyatin and Dominik Harz, who first crossed paths in 2017 while pursuing their PhDs at Imperial College London. They were pioneering researchers at the institution's cryptocurrency lab. Since 2015/16, both Zamyatin and Harz have been engaged in research focused on Bitcoin and Ethereum, contributing to over 30 academic papers that collectively have amassed more than 1,000 citations. Their work has been showcased at numerous prestigious conferences, including DevCon IV, EthCC, Building on Bitcoin, and Breaking Bitcoin. The initial concept for Interlay emerged with the presentation of the XCLAIM paper at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in 2018. This paper introduced the inaugural protocol for transferring cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, to Ethereum in a trustless and decentralized economic framework. In 2020, Zamyatin and Harz officially founded Interlay to translate their research into practical applications. Today, Interlay is a growing enterprise, employing 23 staff members, including developers with diverse experiences from leading firms such as Google, Morgan Stanley, Trivago, Accenture, PwC, Worldpay, and Atlassian. For more detailed information, please refer to Eulerpool.

Interlay is a modular, programmable layer designed to connect Bitcoin with the multichain ecosystem. It stands as the sole Bitcoin-centric Layer 1 that is completely decentralized across its entire stack, providing solutions from a trustless BTC bridge to a BTC DeFi hub. By utilizing BTC as the primary reserve asset and liquidity source, Interlay's infrastructure offers a collection of custody and bridge tools that enable applications to customize asset management according to their distinct use cases. Operating as a marketplace, Interlay currently supports collateralized bridges and plans to integrate threshold shared custody (including institutions and third-party providers), discrete log contracts (DLCs), and zero-knowledge contingent payments (ZKCPs). To bolster security and enhance user experience, Interlay will implement social sign-in features such as Google sign-in and opt-in recovery mechanisms through federation counter-signing and identity verification. Interlay is introducing both EVM-compatible and Rust smart contracts, which are optimized for BTC-centric development and compatible with widely adopted Bitcoin-core libraries and tools. As a result, developers can easily access integrated DeFi tools such as automated market makers (AMM) and lending, along with assets from other ecosystems, including stablecoins and prominent Layer 1 assets. This positions Interlay uniquely to enhance the predominantly centralized BTC stack (including Lightning nodes, Nostr servers, indexers, and centralized exchanges) through decentralized custody and smart contracts.