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About Trust Machines
Trust Machines is a product studio for the Bitcoin ecosystem, building across wallets, lending and NFTs: Leather is a self-custody wallet for native BTC and Stacks assets, Granite lets users borrow stablecoins against BTC without selling, and Gamma hosts on-chain art issuance. The gap it targets is the shortage of yield tools for bitcoin holders, since custodial routes require handing over keys. The path converts BTC into a programmable asset through sBTC, keeps signing in the user's wallet, and writes liquidation conditions into Clarity contracts.
The three products cover different moves by the same users: Leather manages addresses, signing and sBTC minting and redemption, Granite borrows stablecoins against BTC, and Gamma puts artwork issuance and royalty settlement into one set of contracts. In a loan, a user converts BTC to sBTC, deposits into Granite, borrows against the ratio, accrues interest per block, then repays to withdraw and redeem; signing stays in Leather and liquidation conditions sit in Clarity contracts that anyone can trigger.
Trust Machines was founded by Stacks founder Muneeb Ali and Princeton professor JP Singh to build a Bitcoin-centric Web3 application ecosystem .
Key milestones:
- In February 2022, it announced a $150M seed round, the largest for a Bitcoin-focused company at the time, with investors including DCG and USV .
- It helped drive the Stacks Nakamoto upgrade and sBTC design, laying the foundation for Bitcoin L2 DeFi .
- It incubated Granite, a borrower-centric Bitcoin DeFi liquidity protocol supporting non-custodial lending .
- Its ecosystem projects include Zest Protocol, BitSafe, and Hermetica, covering lending, yield, and DeFi platforms .
These milestones reflect its long-term layout from infrastructure to application layers.
On 5 October 2026 Xverse announced a strategic round led by Draper Associates with participation from Trust Machines and Draper Dragon, aimed at turning the self-custody wallet into a Bitcoin neobank with yield, spending and USDC borrowing against BTC; the app has passed two million downloads.
In 2026 Trust Machines also brought Gamma fully in-house, with Gamma.io Inc. winding down as a separate company while the platform, collections and creator pages stayed online, a move the team framed as connecting Bitcoin's cultural layer to Stacks programmability. Its portfolio also includes the Granite Bitcoin lending protocol, the Leather wallet and the .locker identity, and it incubates projects such as Zest Protocol.
Future strategy and roadmap: In 2026 Trust Machines advances the Bitcoin financial stack around the Stacks roadmap: next it will deliver self-custodial BTC staking (PoX-5, targeting 3,000 BTC staked at 3 percent APY paired with 5 percent STX), raise Clarity WASM throughput about 100x, optimize the sBTC bridge, and aim to support 10,000 active AI agents. After Xverse's Draper strategic round, it expands into a Bitcoin neobank offering yield, spending and BTC-collateralized USDC borrowing; Granite lending, Leather wallet and the merged Gamma form Bitcoin's on-chain culture layer, with the next focus on broadening institutional and developer access.
Trust Machines is how Muneeb Ali pushes Bitcoin from settlement layer toward application layer. Ali earned a PhD in computer science at Princeton working on distributed systems, entered the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2013, co-founded Blockstack with Ryan Shea in 2014, the project that became Stacks, and in 2021 helped incubate the developer tooling company Hiro, where he chairs the board. He launched Trust Machines in 2022.
Ali moves between Princeton, the Stacks Foundation and, since September 2026, the CEO seat at Stacks Labs, where the focus is BTC staking and institutional partnerships.