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Kontor is a next-generation metaprotocol on Bitcoin. A metaprotocol is a set of rules for interpreting Bitcoin transactions in a way that Bitcoin itself doesn’t recognize—adding functionality on top of Bitcoin without changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules. Other metaprotocols, like Colored Coins, Counterparty, Ordinals, Runes, BRC-20 and Alkanes all work the same way: they use Bitcoin for transaction ordering and finality, but add meaning to transactions that Bitcoin miners don’t need to understand. Kontor distinguishes itself by providing rich smart contracts with expressive languages, native composability between contracts, and deep integration with Bitcoin’s transaction model. The aim is to support the kind of complex financial applications—intricate asset logic, composable DeFi protocols, and programmable primitives—that have historically required purpose-built blockchains, while preserving the security and value alignment that make Bitcoin metaprotocols distinctive. Kontor transactions embed data in Bitcoin witnesses. Kontor uses Taproot to encode its transactions. Each Kontor operation is a commit-reveal pair: you create a Bitcoin transaction (the “commit”) with a special Taproot output, then spend it immediately (the “reveal”) with a script that contains your actual Kontor data. The data sits in Bitcoin’s witness section—the part of a transaction that stores signatures and other information that doesn’t affect the core transaction graph. Bitcoin nodes relay these transactions, miners include them in blocks, and the data is preserved in the blockchain forever, but Bitcoin itself doesn’t execute any Kontor logic. To Bitcoin, these are just normal transactions paying normal fees. Indexers interpret the protocol. The key innovation of metaprotocols is that protocol state is derived, not enforced by miners. Anyone can run a Kontor indexer—software that scans Bitcoin blocks, finds Kontor transactions, and processes them according to Kontor’s rules. If you deploy a smart contract, the indexer stores the contract’s WebAssembly bytecode. If you call a contract function, the indexer executes that function in a sandboxed environment and updates the contract’s state. Crucially, every indexer that processes the same Bitcoin history will arrive at the same state, because the rules are deterministic. You don’t need to trust a specific indexer; you can verify the state yourself by running your own. Metaprotocols vs sidechains and rollups. The metaprotocol architecture is fundamentally different from Layer-2 approaches like sidechains or rollups. Sidechains have their own consensus mechanisms and validators—you’re trusting a separate network to correctly process transactions and honestly report state back to Bitcoin. Rollups use cryptographic proofs to reduce trust, but still operate as separate systems that must bridge assets on and off Bitcoin, creating economic friction and competing with Bitcoin for transaction fees. Metaprotocols, by contrast, have the same security model as Bitcoin itself: every transaction is a Bitcoin transaction, secured by Bitcoin’s full hashpower. The only difference is that users must run or trust an additional codebase (the indexer) to interpret protocol state. This makes metaprotocols fundamentally synergistic with Bitcoin—they increase network activity, pay miners more fees, and extend Bitcoin’s functionality without requiring changes to Bitcoin or creating alternative consensus mechanisms.