Bitcoin settles every ten minutes. Markets clear in milliseconds.
That gap is the reason Bitcoin has no capital markets. Every attempt to close it so far has moved Bitcoin somewhere faster and left a receipt behind.
Arch closes it without the BTC ever leaving.
Here's how:
→ The UTXO gets an account. A real Bitcoin output on the base layer is bound to an Arch account that holds application state and program logic. Same output, now with a program attached.
→ Arch executes above it. A new block every 180 milliseconds, 1,500 TPS, an eBPF VM. State changes at market speed while the output underneath it does not move at all.
→ Control is split before it is ever used. Authority over that output exists only as shares distributed across validators through FROST/ROAST threshold signing. There is no single key anywhere, at any point.
→ Moving the BTC requires the network to agree. When a state transition calls for a spend, the shares combine into one signature. Not a custodian's discretion or a committee approval, but a cryptographic threshold.
→ Settlement is a Bitcoin transaction. One ordinary spend, one block, Bitcoin's own finality. Nothing to contest and nothing to unwind.
Fast where it needs to be. Final where it counts.
180ms to execute. ~10 minutes to settle. One UTXO that was never wrapped, never rehypothecated, never off Bitcoin.
Real Bitcoin. Finally programmable.