A new immutability primitive for institutional digital-asset settlement.
26 May 2026
Today AEREDIUM completed the first end-to-end attestation of its transaction history to the Bitcoin network. AEREDIUM transactions are bundled into batches, committed via a cryptographic summary, and published to Bitcoin as an immutable record. The milestone was achieved on testnet and is publicly verifiable: every notarised batch is visible on the AEREDIUM block explorer at testnet.explorer.aeredium.io/anchoring, and the corresponding Bitcoin transactions can be inspected directly on mempool.space. The notary wallet is open for audit. The proof is on Bitcoin.
The significance is architectural. AEREDIUM's transaction record now inherits Bitcoin's proof-of-work as its immutability anchor. Reversing an AEREDIUM transaction inside a confirmed batch would require reorganising Bitcoin itself. This is the foundation on which a new class of programmable commerce becomes possible — settled, eventually, in real Bitcoin and immutably anchored to it.
AEREDIUM operates at throughput Bitcoin cannot match, and now inherits Bitcoin's security through periodic attestation of its transaction history. The two chains are complementary layers, not competing ones.
What Was Achieved Today
AEREDIUM is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain built as the Trust Layer for Institutional Digital-Asset Settlement. Today's milestone is a single, precise achievement: the AEREDIUM chain is now attesting its transaction history to Bitcoin, end to end, on testnet.
AEREDIUM transactions flow into AEREDIUM blocks at AEREDIUM throughput. Periodically, AEREDIUM's notary service takes the transaction set from a range of recent AEREDIUM blocks, computes a cryptographic commitment over that transaction set — a state root, a batch end-height, and a proof hash — and publishes the commitment to the Bitcoin network as an OP_RETURN record tagged AERX. Each AERX record is eighty bytes. Once the Bitcoin transaction carrying the record is confirmed, the AEREDIUM transactions covered by that batch become immutable against the security of Bitcoin's proof-of-work.
What the achievement does not claim is also important. AEREDIUM has not, today, executed an end-to-end smart-contract transaction settling in real Bitcoin at the application layer. What AEREDIUM has done is establish the immutability primitive — the attestation layer — on which such transactions can be built. The architectural implications, set out further below, are substantial.
Two Chains, Complementary Roles
It is important to understand precisely how AEREDIUM and Bitcoin interact in this architecture. They operate at entirely different scales, for entirely different purposes.
Bitcoin produces one block every ten minutes. It processes, on average, between five and ten transactions per second. Its purpose is to be the most secure, most decentralised, most trust-minimised settlement layer in the history of digital value. AEREDIUM, by contrast, produces approximately fifty blocks per second. On testnet, AEREDIUM has processed transaction volume of approximately two hundred and fifty thousand transactions per second. Its purpose is to be the execution and programmability layer for institutional commerce.
AEREDIUM blocks do not interact with, sit alongside, or compete with Bitcoin blocks. They live entirely on AEREDIUM, at AEREDIUM throughput. The Bitcoin network does not validate, replay, or execute AEREDIUM transactions. What Bitcoin does, in this architecture, is serve as the immutability anchor for AEREDIUM's transaction record. The two chains are joined by a single thread — the periodic attestation — and that thread carries no execution load.
This is the right architecture. AEREDIUM operates at the throughput modern commerce requires. Bitcoin provides the security guarantee no other chain can match. Combining the two delivers what neither can deliver alone.
How It Works
The architecture is fully reproducible against public testnet data. Any reader can verify the claims below directly.
AEREDIUM's consensus engine is a TEE-BFT design — Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus running inside hardware-attested trusted execution environments. Block production is deterministic, signed, and tamper-evident. As AEREDIUM blocks are produced, AEREDIUM's notary service collects the transactions they contain, batches them, and computes a commitment over each batch. The commitment is then published to Bitcoin via a single OP_RETURN transaction signed by the public notary wallet. The notary record carries the protocol version, the batch end-height, the AEREDIUM state root at that height, and a proof hash that anchors the inclusion structure.
Verification follows a published procedure. A reader opens the AEREDIUM explorer, selects any batch, and notes the corresponding Bitcoin transaction hash. The reader then opens mempool.space testnet, locates the transaction, and decodes the OP_RETURN payload. The payload reveals the AERX header, the version byte, the batch end-height, the state root, and the proof hash. For a specific AEREDIUM transaction, the reader fetches the notary receipt from the AEREDIUM explorer and verifies Merkle inclusion of that transaction against the on-chain batch root. The proof terminates on Bitcoin. There is no further trust assumption.
What Becomes Possible
Today's attestation primitive is the foundation. The class of applications it enables, once activated at the application layer, has not been buildable until now.
Through KIMA — the bridgeless cross-chain settlement technology AEREDIUM has acquired and integrated into the Trust Layer stack — AEREDIUM has the capacity to settle in real Bitcoin without bridges, without wrapped tokens, and without custodial intermediaries. KIMA's threshold-signature settlement engine, secured by AEREDIUM's AERKey infrastructure, can move actual Bitcoin on the Bitcoin network in response to AEREDIUM contract execution. When this capability is combined with today's attestation primitive, a settlement architecture becomes available that has no precedent: a developer will be able to deploy a Solidity smart contract on AEREDIUM, transact in real Bitcoin through KIMA's bridgeless rails, and have the entire transaction history immutably anchored to Bitcoin's proof-of-work through AEREDIUM's attestation layer. No bridge in the trust path. No wrapped representation. No custodian.
The applications this combination unlocks are commercially significant. A merchant accepting Bitcoin for a high-value good will be able to transact on a smart-contract platform with finality that ultimately terminates on Bitcoin. A platform settling cross-border B2B invoices in Bitcoin will be able to offer auditable, immutable settlement records that any counterparty can independently verify. An escrow service will be able to hold real Bitcoin under threshold-signature control while executing arbitrarily complex release conditions in Solidity. Subscription businesses, tokenised real-world assets, programmable conditional disbursement of regulated funds — all of these become not merely possible but verifiable, end to end.
The institutional applications extend further. Pay-for-success bonds — the instrument KIMA is developing with the European Central Bank — become deployable with Bitcoin as the settlement currency and AEREDIUM's attestation as the immutability guarantee. Delivery-versus-payment settlement for tokenised securities, of the kind KIMA pioneered with the Bank of Israel, becomes available with Bitcoin as the payment leg.
Institutional Context
The KIMA settlement engine, now integrated into AEREDIUM, is a proven technology. Its bridgeless threshold-signature architecture has been independently audited by CertiK, Cyberscope, and Halborn. It has been validated by two of the world's most demanding institutional counterparties.
In November 2024, KIMA executed the first-ever purchase of a tokenised stock using Israel's digital shekel, as part of the Bank of Israel's CBDC pilot programme. The transaction was a real-time delivery-versus-payment settlement of a tokenised asset against a sovereign central bank digital currency — the kind of transaction that financial-market infrastructure has been trying to deliver, in production, for the better part of a decade.
In May 2025, KIMA joined the European Central Bank's Pioneers Partnership Programme for the digital euro. KIMA is working with the ECB on programmable payments and Pay-for-Success bonds — conditional payment instruments that disburse only on verified outcome. KIMA sits alongside SAP, Accenture, KPMG, Quant Network, and Swisscom in that programme. It is the only bridgeless cross-chain settlement protocol in the cohort.
Eitan Katz, KIMA's founder and the architect of these institutional relationships, has joined AEREDIUM as Director of Strategy and Banking Rails. The KIMA technology did not transfer as intellectual property alone — the people, the relationships, and the institutional trust transferred with it. AEREDIUM today combines the bridgeless settlement infrastructure that two central banks have validated, the threshold-signature engineering (AERKey) that AEREDIUM has built around it, and the Bitcoin attestation layer announced today.
From Testnet to Mainnet
Today's achievement is on testnet. This is the correct sequencing for any settlement infrastructure of consequence — one does not launch a Bitcoin attestation system into production without an open, observable, adversarially testable testnet phase. AEREDIUM's testnet phase is now in that observable state. The notary wallet is public. The OP_RETURN records are on Bitcoin testnet. The explorer is live. The verification procedure is documented.
AEREDIUM's mainnet launch is scheduled within the next two to three months. The testnet phase will continue in parallel through that period, providing a public record of architectural performance, attestation regularity, and end-to-end auditability ahead of mainnet activation. Institutional partners engaging with AEREDIUM now do so with the architecture fully visible.
About AEREDIUM
AEREDIUM is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain built as the Trust Layer for Institutional Digital-Asset Settlement. Its architecture combines TEE-BFT consensus, the AERKey threshold-signature engine (US Patent Application 63/977,868), and the KIMA bridgeless cross-chain settlement layer. AEREDIUM's technology has been validated through institutional partnerships including the Bank of Israel, the European Central Bank, Mastercard, and CBI Bank UAE.
AEREDIUM Holdings Inc. is led by founder and chief executive Albert Dadon. Eitan Katz, founder of KIMA, serves as Director of Strategy and Banking Rails.
Contact
[email protected] · aeredium.io · testnet.explorer.aeredium.io/anchoring