Since its beginning, Bitcoin has emerged with decentralization, permanence and security as its guiding principles.
To achieve this, Bitcoin has been deliberately designed with limitations to its ability to process more expressive compute. In order to extend its properties to support more complicated systems and computations, developers have to implement innovative techniques while minimizing changes to Bitcoin's core.
ZK-SNARKs are a Dream Come True for Bitcoin
The idea of using zk-SNARKs to scale Bitcoin was actually introduced as early as 2013, by Gregory Maxwell, one of the core contributors to Bitcoin. Since then, zk proofs have proliferated through the crypto space, with significant support from Vitalik Buterin, who put it on the Ethereum roadmap. It is very clear that zk proofs and SNARKs in particular have a significant role to play in scaling Bitcoin.
For years, Bitcoin's limited and inflexible script made SNARK verification on Bitcoin seemingly impossible.
However, in October 2023, the BitVM whitepaper published by Robin Linus inspired developers to begin challenging that belief. When BitVM was first introduced, it didn't apply zk proofs in its implementation of fraud proof verification, but instead described a generalized VM that included a fraud proof process. While the ideas encouraged further development, there were still significant practical hurdles around blockspace, cost and trustlessness.
Building on the ideas presented in the BitVM whitepaper, and combining them with SNARK proofs, the BitcoinOS team has managed to build and successfully implement our own zk prover/challenger protocol that can practically run on Bitcoin.
What Makes BitSNARK Special
We created BitSNARK as an optimized VM to address the practical limitations of the BitVM paradigm. We published our whitepaper in April 2024, covering how BitSNARK improves on both costs and blockspace requirements, reduces sybil attack vectors, while significantly reducing trust assumptions inherent in BitVM. This paper was validated when we verified the first zk proof on Bitcoin in July 2024 with BitSNARK. Furthermore, the paper also describes how BitSNARK can be implemented to create trustless bridging for Bitcoin, a key and missing part of the Bitcoin scaling puzzle thus far. We named the bridge Grail.
As teams continue to expand the use case and capabilites for Bitcoin, we are convinced that BitSNARK and Grail will play crucial roles in the scaling of Bitcoin far beyond a store of value. We are already seeing the same concepts described in Robin Linus' BitVM2 paper, incorporating both SNARKs and extending it's use case to describe a near trustless bridge, similar to that of Grail.
Our mission is to build a Bitcoin native interoperable and trustless system without forks, where any type of computation or VM can plug into Bitcoin and enable the creation of a global economy on top of true censorship resistant and sound money.
BitSNARK is currently under further optimization and Grail bridge is in the final stages of completion, and we are entering several key partnerships and integrations within and outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem. More on this will be revealed in due time, but announcements are made on our Twitter and Blog.
Please also join our builders community on telegram if you want to contribute and build a world on Bitcoin together.
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