For fifteen years, Bitcoin has faced a fundamental limitation: most attempts to extend its functionality required trusting custodians without unilateral exit. Exchanges hold your keys. Wrapped bitcoin protocols control the underlying assets. Early sidechains trapped funds behind federation signatures. Each custodial solution creates honeypots that attract both hackers and regulators, with users having no recourse when trust fails. Lightning improved this with unilateral exit mechanisms, yet remained limited to payment channels between specific parties. The search for trustless bridges with arbitrary computation became Bitcoin's holy grail, pursued by brilliant minds yet always remaining just out of reach.