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Key Concepts

A short glossary to get you oriented. Each item links to a deeper page where one exists. The assets are grouped into what is Live today and what is Planned.

The assets​

Live​

  • frBTC. Your Bitcoin, made programmable. frBTC is BTC atomically wrapped 1:1 into a token that works with on-chain apps and settles natively on Bitcoin.

  • DIESEL. The protocol's native emission. Every Bitcoin block emits the same amount of DIESEL as new bitcoin (3.125 today) on the same halving schedule. See DIESEL for the numbers and who receives it.

  • FIRE. The Alkanes governance token, rewarding people who provide liquidity to the DIESEL/frBTC pool, and powered by staking and bonding. It is how active participants earn a share of the protocol and, over time, help govern it.

Planned​

  • frUSD. The ultimate Bitcoin-native stablecoin: a stable US-dollar coin that settles on Bitcoin with no ability for any entity to shut it off or censor it.

  • dxBTC. Yield-bearing Bitcoin. You stake BTC and receive dxBTC; behind the scenes your Bitcoin is put to work in market-neutral yield strategies without ever leaving the Bitcoin blockchain.

  • FUEL. The governance token for the subfrost protocol's treasury and parameters (for example, mint/redeem fees and protocol upgrades). Its tokenomics are not yet public.

Note

Capitalization is what separates the two "fuels" you will meet in these docs: FUEL in uppercase is always this token, while lowercase fuel is the compute budget an Alkanes contract call is allowed to spend, the equivalent of gas elsewhere. See Alkanes for that one.

How you trade assets​

  • The AMM (automated market maker). A swap works against a shared liquidity pool instead of matching you with another trader. This efficiency always provides you with a counterparty, and the price adjusts with supply and demand. This is what powers swaps in the app.

The two fees worth knowing, both current rates rather than permanent guarantees:

ActionFeeWhere it goes
Swapping1% by default0.8% to liquidity providers, 0.2% permanently to the AMM protocol
Wrapping or unwrapping BTC0.1%SUBFROST protocol

See Swap, Pools & Liquidity and Wrap & Unwrap.

  • PSBT marketplaces (partially signed Bitcoin transactions). Across Alkanes there are several PSBT marketplaces where buyers and sellers choose to fill each other's orders. SUBFROST does not currently host one of these.

What it all runs on​

  • Alkanes. The smart-contract protocol that these tokens live on. Alkanes lets developers run programmable contracts directly on Bitcoin (contracts are written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly), inheriting Bitcoin's security instead of relying on a separate chain. frBTC, DIESEL, and FIRE are all Alkanes tokens. See the Technical Overview section for the full model.

  • Metashrew indexer. Bitcoin blocks do not "run" contracts on their own. An indexer reads each new block and executes the contract code embedded in the block (specifically in the OP_RETURN). When you see your Alkanes balances, it comes from the Metashrew indexer.

One level deeper

This section keeps things simple on purpose. Terms like protostone, cellpack, and the exact contract model are covered in the Technical Overview section, and the developer tooling (CLI, SDK, JSON-RPC) is in Build on SUBFROST and the API & SDK Docs.

What is live today​

Being honest about status matters. A quick snapshot:

  • Live: Atomic wrapping of frBTC and unwrapping back to BTC, swapping in AMM pools between Bitcoin assets and BTC, providing liquidity to these AMM pools to earn a yield, and staking and bonding within the advanced DeFi "FIRE" vault.
  • Planned: a Bitcoin-native stablecoin (frUSD), a yield-bearing Bitcoin vault token (dxBTC), the FUEL governance token, and the fully permissionless signer network.

Where to go next​