Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Bitcoin Digital Object?
A Bitcoin Digital Object (BDO) is a digital object whose ownership is secured by Bitcoin. It can be owned by a person rather than an application, verified from public evidence without relying on the issuing platform, and carried across compatible applications. BDO is an open category — a kind of thing, not a product. Full answer →
What makes something a BDO?
Three properties: Own (ownership belongs to the user, anchored to Bitcoin), Verify (integrity and issuer signatures are independently checkable from public evidence), and Carry (the object and its verification evidence travel with the owner across compatible applications). An object with all three is a BDO regardless of which software created it. The principles →
What does “Own, Verify, Carry” mean?
Own: no platform is intended to be the ultimate source of truth for ownership — it resolves to Bitcoin-secured evidence. Verify: anyone can check that the object is intact and that specific keys signed it, by recomputation and signature validation; associating a key with a real-world identity additionally requires an identity source the verifier trusts. Carry: moving the object moves everything needed to keep recognizing and verifying it — not just a token, but its evidence. In depth →
Is BDO a protocol, a token standard, a company, or a product?
None of these. BDO is an open category that describes a kind of digital object. Protocols (like Taproot Assets) provide the underlying ownership rails; open specifications (like STAS-01) define technical representation; companies build implementations. The category itself is publicly defined and owned by no one.
What is STAS-01?
STAS-01 is an open interoperability specification for representing Bitcoin Digital Objects using the Taproot Assets protocol on Bitcoin. It defines how an object's identifier, canonical content, integrity, and attestations work so that independent applications agree byte-for-byte. Its core is Released (v1.0); its concrete profiles are In Review, published with test vectors. Full page →
How does BDO relate to Bitcoin, Taproot Assets, and Lightning?
Bitcoin anchors ownership and integrity evidence. Taproot Assets is the protocol STAS-01 binds to — consumed exactly as its maintainers specify, never modified. Lightning is a transfer rail Taproot Assets supports; because a STAS-01 object's identifier derives from the asset's genesis information rather than from any transfer path, objects moved over Lightning remain the same verifiable objects.
Is any specific platform required to create or use BDOs?
No. The category and the specifications developed for it are public, and creating, holding, and verifying BDOs does not depend on any vendor. Platforms exist that make issuing BDOs easy — including from self-custodial infrastructure the issuer runs — but they implement the category; they do not gatekeep it. What exists today →
Can anyone implement BDO?
Yes. The defining documents and the STAS-01 specification are public repositories under open licenses, the standard evolves through a public RFC process, and frozen test vectors let any new implementation prove byte-exactness independently. An implementation needs nobody's permission.
How is a BDO verified?
Under STAS-01, in three independent steps. Integrity: recompute the hash of the object's canonical bytes and compare it with the commitment fixed at issuance in the asset's genesis information. Anchor: validate the asset's Taproot Assets proofs against Bitcoin with standard tooling. Authenticity: validate the attestations — issuer signatures over the integrity commitment — with standard cryptography. All three use public evidence and none requires contacting a platform. What signature validation proves is that a specific key signed; deciding whether that key belongs to the claimed real-world issuer is an identity question each verifier answers with its own trust sources.
How is a BDO different from an NFT?
“NFT” is a broad term for non-fungible digital assets, implemented in many different ways across chains, contract standards, and metadata models — the term names a family of technologies rather than a single definition. BDO is defined the other way around: it is a category with conceptual requirements — Own, Verify, Carry — that an object either meets or does not, independent of technology. STAS-01 is one concrete realization of that category on Bitcoin, using the Taproot Assets protocol, with a deterministic canonical representation (one object, one byte sequence), a persistent protocol-derived identifier, typed real-world semantics signed by the issuer, and specification-defined verification rules that any independent implementation can apply. The useful distinction is not that one is better, but that they answer different questions: “NFT” describes how certain tokens are built; “BDO” defines what properties an object must have — and then points to open specifications for how to build it.
Can BDOs represent memberships, tickets, certificates, or physical products?
Yes — by design. The proposed Type vocabulary (RFC-0017, In Review) defines ticket (consumed on admission), membership (checked, never consumed), redeemable (consumed per use), certificate (a signed statement about a subject, such as the authenticity of a physical item — verified, never consumed), and collectible. Physical products are typically linked through a certificate object bound to the item, for example via an NFC tag or serial reference. The kinds of BDOs →