[BTC integration] ICP canisters now have access to BTC testnet balances and UTXOs

Developers
1

An example of how to use this:

This is an experimental feature, currently only enabled on a single isolated subnet (2fq7c), and other subnets can use it via xnet communication (which causes most of the latency). In the future we could enable the BTC feature on multiple subnets and avoid the xnet latency.

What’s next? Right now canisters can read BTC testnet state, but not interact with it yet. Our next goal is to enable experimental threshold ECDSA signing on ICP mainnet, so canisters can sign & submit BTC testnet transactions.

note: I shamelessly copied/pasted this from Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/dfinity/comments/v1tlsy/icp_canisters_now_have_access_to_btc_testnet/

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2

@ielashi is a gem. Wondering, Are we running Bitcoin code Node in the ICP permisses to sync the balances ?

3

Yes. Each node runs a process that fetches blocks directly from the Bitcoin network. These blocks are then fed into the Bitcoin canister, and this canister keeps track of the address’ UTXOs and balances.

You can read more details about that in the Bitcoin Integration documentation

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