Institutions are stacking Bitcoin at record pace - and they're not here to sit still.

Corporates, funds, and custodians together are now holding over 6.1M BTC - nearly one-third of all Bitcoin supply, worth more than $600B in 2025. Institutional and custodial holdings have surged to record levels this year, and the trend shows no signs of slowing. These institutions weren’t built to sit on capital. Rather, they want to make it grow.

Unlike any other asset, BTC is one they truly own. Just like you, these behemoths realize that real-estate cannot be moved in an emergency, stocks are dependent of well-functioning regulators, and fiat money dwindles away at the whims of central banks. Everything suddenly seems corruptible and uncertain. Bitcoin is different: it’s the first asset they can truly possess - the state can’t take it away from them just like it can’t take it away from you. Institutions don’t want to sacrifice that special quality when they venture in pursuit of yield.

Institutions are ready to put their BTC to work in DeFi. The question is what technology will make it possible to do so. BitcoinOS’s Grail Pro is a technology that is built for these sophisticated establishments to keep their Bitcoin and use it too, by running a dedicated node on their premises. With millions of dollars in BTC from early commitments, Grail Pro is positioned to become the number one way that institutions like Strategy and Blackrock will send their Bitcoin to work.

Empowering BTCFi Without Sacrifices

So far, institutions have stayed out of DeFi simply because they couldn't trust the models available. Wrappers, custodial bridges, and federated "majority" models all represented unacceptable counterparty risks - why give up on Bitcoin’s unique quality of being incorruptible and counterparty-risk-free? We’ve already seen that when custody is preserved, and holders don’t have to give up their keys, capital flows. But many early approaches to “Bitcoin yield” leaned on incentive structures that attracted deposits without offering long-term sustainability. They proved there’s appetite - but not a solution.

Grail Pro changes that. It allows custodians to mint zkBTC - a programmable token built on BOS’s Charms standard and fully verifiable on the Bitcoin network. zkBTC can migrate into lending markets, yield strategies, and cross-chain innovation - while the original BTC never leaves institutional custody.

Security That Matches Scale

The real breakthrough of Grail Pro is that it’s operated by the owners themselves - the very institutions already entrusted with billions in Bitcoin. 

Every Operator is hardened with a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) — a secure, encrypted space. Even if you were the machine owner, you couldn't force it to sign an invalid transaction.

Here's the mechanism:

• TEE Protection: A signer signs a transaction only if the zero-knowledge proof is valid. Dishonest transactions are not possible to force through.

• Distributed Custody: Instead of 2-of-3 multisig, Grail Pro makes use of a network of at least 16 Operators spread among multiple custodians. A supermajority (e.g., 12 of 16) is needed for a withdrawal. No system at this level of distributed custody has ever been breached.

• Insider Protection:Custodians collectively protect one another, so even if an employee at one institution tried to cheat, the other Operators would block the attempt.

Each custodian can maintain control of its own BTC directly, while zkBTC issuance and redemption require a supermajority of Operators to sign. Compromising the system would therefore demand breaching two-thirds of independent TEEs across multiple custodians - a level of attack never achieved - and due to ZK immediately detected.

From Pilot to Reality

Grail Pro has already minted its first 100 BTC into zkBTC, amounting to over $10 million in TVL. And this is only the start. There is active interest from major institutions that are set to send thousands of BTC to work - hundreds of millions in TVL. Look out for significant announcements on this front in the coming weeks.

In these early deals, institutions are finally utilizing their BTC as collateral without ever giving the borrower possession of their Bitcoin. This is what removing counterparty risk is all about. This is what it means to put Bitcoin to work.

And the expansion is just beginning. The zkBTC and Grail Pro project will soon extend to Bitcoin's UTXO Bros - Cardano and Litecoin - where zkBTC will enable real Bitcoin to natively move across their chains, no different than any other token.

From Digital Gold to Active Digital Economy

Bitcoin earned its reputation as digital gold. With Grail Pro, it now steps into its next role: the cornerstone of a living, programmable economy. For custodians, Grail Pro is fresh streams of revenue and efficiency. For DeFi, it's the institutional capital everyone's been waiting for. And for Bitcoin itself, it's one step further down its path: a globally interconnected financial system.

Institutions are coming to DeFi. Grail Pro is how.