AmericanFortress is publishing research that could give crypto bridges another check before releasing funds: proof that the destination wallet shares the same secret origin as the wallet that made the deposit.
The proposed zero-knowledge system lets users prove that relationship without revealing the underlying secret—the private information from which their wallets are derived. Its selective-disclosure approach can establish the connection for a verifier without making it persistently public.
The paper extends Zero-Knowledge Proof of Seed Provenance, or ZKPoSP, across different cryptographic schemes, including Bitcoin’s secp256k1 and Solana’s Ed25519. A bridge using the system could refuse a payout to a substituted destination address that cannot produce the required proof.
AmericanFortress reports that a single full-path proof takes about 6.65 seconds to generate and 475 milliseconds to verify. Those are per-proof benchmarks over secp256k1. For a two-chain scenario, the paper estimates approximately 13.3 seconds of total proving work and 950 milliseconds of verification work, excluding an additional linkage step that has not been benchmarked.
Those results bring the proposal closer to something a bridge could use in a transaction flow. They do not yet establish how the complete system would perform in production.
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The Bridge Problem Is What AmericanFortress Wants to Fix
A bridge receives instructions to send assets to an address on another blockchain. Establishing that the destination shares the sender’s wallet provenance is a separate challenge.
“Every bridge today pays whatever address it's handed,” AmericanFortress says. “We give it a way to check that the address belongs to the person who made the deposit, without learning anything else about either wallet.”
The market is already substantial. DefiLlama’s dashboards show roughly $53.6 billion in bridge TVL and about $29.7 billion in 30-day volume according to current industry tracking. The figures measure different things and fluctuate, but both illustrate how much capital already depends on cross-chain infrastructure.
AmericanFortress is proposing an additional security check for that infrastructure. It would not, by itself, prevent flaws in bridge contracts, compromised validators or failures in message verification.
The research also builds on the company’s earlier work on protecting existing wallets from quantum attacks. Its post-quantum security depends on assumptions about the proof system and underlying hash functions; it does not make an entire bridge quantum-safe.
The Same Proof Can Follow the Money
The bridge application is only one part of the research. AmericanFortress also applies the proof system to transaction provenance, allowing recipients to identify who sent a payment and later prove selected transactions to an auditor without exposing their wider transaction history or handing over wallet keys.
“The proof travels with the payment. The recipient knows exactly who paid them. The chain sees a one-time address. The auditor sees the transactions you show them and none you don't,” AmericanFortress says.
The idea could matter for institutions, exchanges, payment companies and tokenized-asset platforms that need to demonstrate where funds came from without publishing everything else happening in a wallet.
The distinction is important because institutional users don't necessarily need total anonymity. They need the ability to disclose specific information to a counterparty, auditor or regulator without exposing their entire financial history.
AmericanFortress frames that approach directly: “This isn't privacy versus compliance. It's proving the specific relationship someone is entitled to see, and nothing beyond it.”
It Could Also Address One of Crypto's Simplest Problems
The same architecture has a consumer application: proving that money is going to the wallet the user actually intended.
Address-poisoning attacks can trick users into copying look-alike addresses from their transaction histories. AmericanFortress's proposed approach replaces that visual check with a cryptographic proof that the destination address belongs to the intended owner.
The company describes the proposition simply as “Proof that the money went to the right wallet, even across chains.”
That gives the underlying technology several potential applications at once: bridge security, institutional privacy, payment provenance and consumer protection. The common thread is that the system proves a relationship without requiring the underlying identity or private key to become public.
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The ZK Market Is Already Billions of Dollars
AmericanFortress is entering a broader zero-knowledge market that is expanding beyond crypto. Industry estimates put the global zero-knowledge-proof market at roughly $1.9 billion in 2026, with projections reaching several billion dollars later in the decade.
The broader crypto privacy-infrastructure category is also substantial, although its definition is wider than AmericanFortress's specific addressable market. That includes networks and protocols using ZK proofs, fully homomorphic encryption and other technologies.
AmericanFortress is entering a competitive field that includes Railgun, Aztec and Aleo on the zero-knowledge side, as well as Zama, which is pursuing confidential blockchain applications through fully homomorphic encryption.
The approaches differ. Some projects are building privacy-focused networks, some are creating applications and others are developing underlying cryptographic infrastructure.
AmericanFortress is betting on middleware: adding privacy, ownership proofs and selective disclosure to blockchains that already have users, applications and liquidity.
The Business Case Is Integration
In its August partnership announcement with Casper, AmericanFortress said it had raised more than $9 million and held 14 patents granted, allowed or pending. Its current research page separately lists 16 patent applications filed and one U.S. patent granted, so the earlier portfolio figure should not be read as 14 granted patents.
The Casper partnership covers quantum-safe wallets, zero-knowledge compliance infrastructure, cross-chain naming and regulated real-world assets. AmericanFortress has also announced a beta launch on Arbitrum, aimed at institutional and high-volume DeFi activity—a development Blockster previously covered.
Those developments show the direction of the business, but they do not establish widespread production adoption. The materials reviewed for this story do not establish a verified number of active business customers or transaction volume.
The next test is whether wallets, bridges, exchanges and institutions will integrate the technology at scale. For infrastructure providers, partnerships and beta deployments are early milestones; recurring usage is the harder part.
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Blockchain’s Next Race May Be About What It Doesn’t Reveal
Blockchain infrastructure has spent years competing over throughput, fees and settlement speed. As more financial activity moves onchain, another question becomes harder to avoid: how much information does a transaction actually need to expose?
If AmericanFortress’s approach gains traction, the competition may increasingly turn on how much a blockchain can prove without revealing everything it knows.
Reporting by Lidia Yadlos
