Alpen Labs kicks off Testnet III integrations with 21 partners to build Bitcoin-native DeFi

Alpen Labs just crossed a milestone that Bitcoin DeFi watchers have been tracking for months. The company announced that more than 21 launch partners have begun integrating on Testnet III, its latest testing environment built on Bitcoin Signet, as the project inches closer to a mainnet launch. Bridge operators Stakely and Chainflow are already live on the testnet, with P2P.org expected to join soon. The goal is stress-testing the Strata bridge, Alpen’s core infrastructure piece that uses a 1-of-N trust model for Bitcoin transactions. In English: only one operator in the entire set needs to be honest for the bridge to remain secure. That’s a meaningfully lower trust assumption than most bridges in crypto, which have historically been the industry’s favorite attack surface. What Alpen is actually building Alpen Labs is building Bitcoin-native financial infrastructure, the kind of programmable layer that lets people lend, borrow, and mint stablecoins without leaving the Bitcoin ecosystem. The centerpiece of that vision is the Strata bridge, which connects Bitcoin to Alpen’s execution environment. Testnet III features what Alpen describes as the first publicly usable garbled circuit-ba...