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👋 Introduction

Bitcoin is trustless by design - transparent, decentralized, self-sovereign. The lending platforms built around it are not. They are custodial, opaque, and centralized; they ask Bitcoiners to surrender their keys, their visibility, and their control in exchange for liquidity.

The most principled Bitcoiners - the ones who care most about custody, verification, and openness - end up compromising everything Bitcoin stands for, just to access credit against the asset they hold.

Surge is a Bitcoin-native credit market.

Built ground-up around self-custody and programmable control, Surge lets Bitcoiners borrow stablecoins without giving up ownership of their BTC, without trusting a custodian, and without compromising the values that brought them to Bitcoin in the first place.

It is not a rebrand of legacy lending. It is a reimagination - a credit market for the real Bitcoiners of today.

With Surge, you:

  • Borrow against your Bitcoin directly on-chain.
  • Hold a programmable Taproot vault verified by threshold Schnorr signatures.
  • Interact with an open credit market powered by independent liquidity providers, not a black-box institution.

What Surge enables

A credit system designed for Bitcoiners, built on Bitcoin, aligned with its ethos.

  • Liquidity without sale. Access stablecoin credit while your BTC stays locked under script, on Bitcoin, never wrapped or rehypothecated.
  • Verifiable custody. Every credit line is a unique Taproot UTXO. Anyone can inspect it on a block explorer at any time.
  • Programmable terms. Borrow at fixed or floating rates from open markets where rates are discovered, not dictated.
  • Guaranteed exit. A script-enforced unilateral path returns your BTC after a relative timelock, with no dependency on Surge or anyone else continuing to operate.
  • Open infrastructure. The same rails that power Surge's own apps are available to any builder - wallet, exchange, neobank, treasury product - to offer borrow or earn under their own brand.

The promise

Never compromise your Bitcoin, ever.

The rest of these docs walk through how that promise is kept - from the Bitcoin script that guards collateral, to the threshold cryptography that produces signatures without ever assembling a private key, to the markets where credit and yield are discovered.

A good place to start is Bitcoin-native Credit Infra - the two-layer model that separates Surge's apps from the protocol underneath, and explains who stewards the whole thing.