Keep is the native cryptocurrency of the Keep Network, a blockchain designed to allow users to send data over public blockchains privately and securely. Keep’s flagship product is tBTC, a decentralized version of bitcoin created for use on the Ethereum blockchain.

All 1 billion keep tokens were released during the project’s launch in 2020, meaning it is not an inflationary asset. Ten percent of keep was set aside for the founding team, 5% for early advisers and 25% for the developing entity behind the Keep Network (formerly Keep SEZC, now Thesis). Keep also provided 5% to reward tBTC liquidity providers for participating in the ecosystem. The remaining 55% was distributed in private token sales and a “stake drop.”

Keep was first sold in two separate simple agreements for future token (SAFT) sales in 2018 and 2020 that made up 35% of the token’s supply. In June 2020, Keep held a public stake drop in collaboration with token staking provider Bison Trails to release 20% of the total supply of keep to users who stake ETH for a period of at least six months, which would be distributed to users gradually over the course of two years.

Keep reached its all-time high of $6.10 in May 2020, just before the public stake drop of the token. Just a few months after the tokens began being distributed to the public, keep reached its all-time low of about $0.40 in November 2020. Following an announcement in October 2021 that Keep would be merging with NuCypher, keep spiked over 585% to a peak of $0.75.

The Keep Network is an open-source, decentralized management system that lets users securely store assets on the Keep Network with full encryption and access, while securely trading a synthetic version of that asset on the Ethereum blockchain. The Keep Network uses private, off-chain sections of its blockchain known as “keeps” to protect user privacy through encryption and private data storage. Additional privacy is created by keeps through their distribution across the Keep Network, which keeps the data decentralized and inaccessible to any singular entity. For tBTC, Keeps stores the private keys to the actual bitcoin in keeps, allowing the keys to remain secure from the public Ethereum blockchain.

Keep Network was developed in 2017 by co-founders Matt Luongo and Corbin Pon and continues to be maintained by Luongo and Pon’s company, Thesis. Prior to becoming a part of Thesis, Keep Network was spun out of the bitcoin rewards app, Fold – another crypto venture developed by Luongo and Pon.

In 2018, Keep Network held its first private token sale, raising over $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Associates, Polychain Capital and others. In April 2020, Keep developer Thesis raised another $7.7 million in a keep token sale round that was led by Paradigm Capital and that included Collaborative Fund, Fenbushi Capital and others. The funds were raised to launch the tBTC mainnet alongside interoperability software provider Summa.

As of January 2022, Keep and NuCypher were completing their merger into the Threshold Network. The project has been given the code name KEaNU from community members to track its progress. Once the deal is completed, the Threshold Network will provide several threshold cryptography primitives for NuCypher and Keep, including proxy re-encryption, threshold signatures, distributed key generation and random beacons.