⚡️ What are Secured Assets?
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is the driving force needed to achieve self-custody and trustless systems. Yet, when it comes to applying cross-chain interoperability on the ground of DeFi, trust and third-party custody have been unavoidable trade-offs—until now.
Enter Secured Assets, a THORChain primitive made available to the Rujira App Layer. Secured Assets are a revolutionary answer to the problems of cross-chain interoperability, providing an open source, decentralized, and secure cross-chain asset model powered by THORChain.
What are Secured Assets, exactly? This article dives deep into their design, showing how they eliminate custodial risks, remove third-party trust requirements, and fortify security vulnerabilities, all while maintaining full decentralization. THORChain’s novel Secured Assets model furthers the limits of the cross-chain world, offering a safer and more resilient future for DeFi.
⚡️ Decentralization Secures All Things
Before we dig into the mechanics, it’s important to remember why decentralization matters in DeFi: As an ideal, decentralization distributes authority across systems so as to eliminate the single points of failure latent within centralized power structures. For its part, DeFi applies this to financial systems, so that they remain:
✅ Trustless ✅ Open ✅ Accessible ✅ Secure ✅ Censorship-resistant
To date, only one asset embodies this philosophy in full: Bitcoin.
⚡️ Limitations of Cross-Chain Interoperability
But, to be clear, Bitcoin’s decentralized nature only applies when it remains on its own chain. That’s to say, the moment it leaves the Bitcoin network, its trustless nature vanishes. Why? Because most cross-chain solutions rely on either wrapping or bridging mechanisms, both of which introduce new single points of failure. Here is where Secured Assets become a solution to this problem. Let’s break down THORChain’s Secured Asset model and then compare its infrastructure to both other models: bridged and wrapped assets.
⚡️ Enter Secured Assets
THORChain’s Secured Assets present a new, native cross-chain asset design, a novel interoperability infrastructure defined by decentralization:
✅ Native-Asset Backed: Backed 1:1 by native assets secured in THORChain’s decentralized Asgard Vaults—i.e. no wrapping by a centralized custodian required.
✅ Secured by Threshold Signature Schemes (TSS): Private keys are split among ~100 independent node operators that churn every 3 days, requiring two-thirds consensus for transactions—i.e. no single entity controls secured assets.
✅ No Third-Party Bridges: Fully autonomous, continuous validation ensures solvency via THORChain’s economic security model—i.e. no external validator sets or low-security multisig.
⚡️ How to Use Secured Assets
Rujira users can seamlessly interact with Secured Assets by following the steps below.
1️⃣ Lock & Mint: Deposit e.g., BTC directly into a decentralized, noncustodial Asgard vault → mint secured BTC in seconds (no KYC, no merchants).
2️⃣ Use: Swap, Trade, Lend, Borrow, or Pool secured BTC with near-zero fees.
3️⃣ Redeem: Withdraw native BTC anytime back to your Bitcoin wallet, instantly → no centralized intermediaries or gatekeepers.
The brief animated video walks users through this simple process, which, at first glance, presents somewhat similarly to bridged assets, but there is a major difference. Let’s now look at how secured assets and bridged assets differ 👇
⚡️ ”But Secured Assets are Just Bridged Assets!”
Bridged assets are IOUs issued by a third-party protocol on the destination chain, and represent a claim on the underlying asset on its native chain. In the best case, the assets on the native chains are secured by an external validator set (e.g. Axellar, Gravity), and in many cases by low-security multisig that have resulted in billions of dollar lost in hacks (Ronin Bridge $625m hack, Wormhole Bridge $326m hack, Nomad Bridge $190m hack, and the list goes on). In any case, they introduce an extra layer of exogenous risk between the native chain and the end user. Secured Assets on Rujira, on the other hand, eliminate this additional layer of risk. While they do indeed mint new assets on THORChain, THORChain’s TSS eliminates the external risks associated with third-party bridges and their security designs. This provides a far more robust architecture for Secured Assets than traditional bridges.
While we’re here, we might as well tackle how secured assets also stack up against wrapped assets 👇
⚡️ Comparing with Wrapped Assets
Wrapped assets are also IOUs, but, unlike bridged assets, these are issued by a centralized intermediary, one that holds the underlying asset in custody (e.g., wBTC issued by BitGo or cbBTC issued by Coinbase). This allows assets like BTC to be used in DeFi on e.g. Ethereum, but it forces users to trust the centralized issuer to secure the underlying assets appropriately, to not misuses the reserves, and to not give in to censorship (e.g. freezing assets under the pressure of arbitrary governments). In using wrapped assets, strangers have now become one’s unintended financial partners, negating the very ethos of decentralization.
In contrast, Secured Assets require no error-prone and corruptible centralized custodian, and are never subject to permission or KYC requirements. Here is a quick breakdown comparing the major characteristic of these asset models and how each operate differently:
⚡️ Wrapped Assets vs Bridged Assets vs Secured Assets
⚡️ Sign off
While no solution is entirely risk-free, Rujira’s model clearly minimizes risk exposure, offering:
✅ Trust-minimized design: Decentralized validation and continuous audits—no reliance on third-party bridge security.
✅ User sovereignty: 1:1 ownership of native BTC and other native assets without centralized intermediaries—No gatekeeper, no KYC, 100% Trustless.
✅ Seamless DeFi: Access DeFi with secured native assets across multiple chains.
Secured Assets on Rujira aren’t just another step forward—they’re a major leap toward a truly omnichain future.
We encourage skepticism, curiosity, and discussion. Explore the Rujira documentation and the THORChain technical papers, and let’s build the future of DeFi together.
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