Funding BitVM

Despite being the sole network with explicitly defined monetary policies, Bitcoin continues to lack the expressivity and scale needed to make its currency - bitcoin - useful. Bitcoin’s smart contracts and apps today consist of unscalable channels or inefficient discrete log contracts.

While any network can host expressivity given enough time, limits with Bitcoin’s current opcode set and the cryptographic leaps needed to circumvent them implied Bitcoin would exist in its current inexpressive form for decades to come. At least, until recently that is.

In spite of limits, Bitcoin is experiencing a resurgence, with teams and developments emerging and ideas such as opcode restoration or “merkleize of all the things” gaining steam. The heart of this renaissance is the BitVM, a low-level Turing complete computer native to Bitcoin. 

Using an interactive game akin to early Arbitrum and validity proofs pioneered by companies like StarkWare, BitVM adds new functionality, bypassing governance to tack rich, useful state to Bitcoin. Critically, enhancements are open and uphold decentralization.

As Bitcoin users and holders, we believe in the programmable future being developed by ZeroSync - the nonprofit behind the BitVM. With it, Bitcoin gains mechanisms for bitcoin-backed stakechains, can power various 2-way pegs for more expressivity, unlocks privacy primitives, and can secure cryptography schemes to prove things like chain headers and state or perhaps even find ways to capture its excess potential energy (MEV).

The BitVM should let Bitcoin secure its own micro-economy, bolster its currency, and offer new censorship resistance space to tinker with. Crucially, this furthers the vision for scalable, sovereign payments laid out in the Bitcoin whitepaper and echoed by various Bitcoiners in years since. While work on tying scripts across blocks is ongoing, the core insight of innovating below the script level is promising, already yielding improvements (BitVM 2) and inspiring distinct approaches.

To that end, we have given the ZeroSync core contributors - Robin Linus, Lukas George, and Tino Steffens - a grant for the development of the BitVM. We are proud to join the cohort of previous grant givers including Geometry, StarkWare, >_OpenSats, and Spiral to support ZeroSync.

For those Bitcoin curious or wanting to collaborate with ZeroSync on the BitVM, more details can be found on the nonprofit’s GitHub, Twitter, and site.