Developers Release BitVM2 White Paper to Advance Bitcoin Programmability Goals

Odaily News Last year, bitcoin developer Robin Linus proposed a theoretical approach to make the bitcoin blockchain more programmable. Today, he has launched a second iteration called "BitVM2," which is said to have significant improvements that could bring the concept closer to real-world deployment. The project will rely on advanced cryptography and innovative design to build a secure "bridge" to transfer bitcoin from the main network to a secondary network called a "rollup." According to the white paper released this week by Linus and five co-authors, the basic setup involves using cryptography to compress programs into subroutines, which are then executed in bitcoin transactions. After that, the programs are "verified" in three on-chain transactions, essentially ensuring that no one is trying to cheat or steal. In previous versions, verification could take up to 70 transactions, according to one of the co-authors, Alexei Zamyatin, who is reportedly working separately for the bitcoin L2 network Build on Bitcoin (BOB). A key improvement in the new version is that anyone can question suspicious transactions, a feature called "permissionless challenges." The original BitVM was released last October, but never really saw any real deployment, with only a fixed set of operators able to launch challenges. "This design gave us these major improvements," Zamyatin said in a video interview. "We now have a complete and comprehensive description of the BitVM paradigm." (CoinDesk)