Alpen Labs Testnet III Goes Live With 21 Bitcoin DeFi Partners

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. The project is now one step closer to a mainnet launch.

Bridge operators Stakely and Chainflow are already live on the testnet. P2P.org is 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. Only one operator in the entire set needs to be honest for the bridge to remain secure. That is a meaningfully lower trust assumption than most bridges in crypto, which have historically been the industry's favorite attack surface, Alpen said.

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-based Bitcoin verifier. Garbled circuits are a cryptographic technique that allows computation to be verified without revealing the underlying data. Applied to Bitcoin verification, this could enable stronger privacy and security guarantees than traditional approaches.

The public testnet first went live on August 4, 2025. The Testnet III partner announcement was made on July 28, 2026.