BitcoinOS to Launch Alpha Mainnet for Digital Ownership Platform
Edan Yago, founder of Sovryn and BitcoinOS, is developing a system to transform Bitcoin into a platform for digital ownership. Born into a family of Holocaust survivors and raised in South Africa, Yago's early experiences smuggling gold coins out of the country between ages nine and eleven shaped his belief that financial freedom is essential for survival and human dignity.
"Money is power, and power is freedom," says Yago. "If you can control people's access to capital, you control their freedom. That's why property rights matter." This conviction drives his work on BitcoinOS, which aims to create a foundation for digital property rights that exists independently of governments or corporations.
Yago sees technology as the primary driver of societal change. He points out that the Industrial Revolution made slavery economically unviable, not a sudden moral awakening. However, he cautions that technology needs direction, citing how the internet evolved from a promise of decentralization into a system dominated by tech giants.
When Yago discovered Bitcoin in 2011, he recognized it as "the missing piece" for digital property rights. While Bitcoin introduced a decentralized ledger for ownership records, and Ethereum added smart contracts for decentralized computation, both have limitations in scale and efficiency.
BitcoinOS addresses these challenges using zero-knowledge proofs, allowing computations to be verified without being run on every node. "Instead of putting everything on a blockchain, we only store the proof that a computation happened correctly," Yago explains. This approach could enable Bitcoin to support various forms of property including:
- Real estate
- Stocks
- Digital identities
- Other assets on Bitcoin's global ledger
Yago describes the crypto industry as being in its "teenage years" but expects it to mature over the next decade. His vision extends beyond Bitcoin to include digital sovereignty and cryptography as a means to enforce rights more effectively than traditional legal systems.
BitcoinOS is scheduled to launch its alpha mainnet within months. Yago remains confident in the project's potential: "We're building property rights for the digital age. Once you understand that, everything else falls into place."
BitcoinOS is scheduled to launch its alpha mainnet within months. Yago remains confident in the project's potential: "We're building property rights for the digital age. Once you understand that, everything else falls into place."
The push for Bitcoin-based solutions comes amid growing institutional adoption. BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, recently introduced its first Bitcoin exchange-traded product in Europe, now available on exchanges in Paris, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt. This follows BlackRock's success in the U.S., where it attracted over $50 billion into similar products.
