When I opened PR #12 on the Pontmore protocol repo, I was trying to answer one question: can we define a standard way for applications to invoke an escrow service directly, without routing through a swap state machine? The answer was yes , but the path from spec to working POC to simplified protocol taught me more than I expected about designing interoperable financial infrastructure.
The Problem: PIP-01 Was Discovery-Only
PIP-01 (the Pontmore Escrow Descriptor) initially served a narrow purpose: allow agents to discover compatible escrow mechanisms for fiat-to-Bitcoin swaps. It was a discovery tool, not an execution engine.
A pre-PR #12 descriptor looked like this:
{
