Last week in bitcoin (Sep 1 - 7)
Highlights from the bitcoin developer ecosystem...
Hi Insiders. This is Tuma, open source reporter from the Insider Edition. I spent last week at Bitcoin++ Istanbul — Scaling Edition. The event brought together developers and researchers that are currently working to scale Bitcoin. Here is what caught my eye:
Bitcoin++ Istanbul — Scaling Edition has just concluded. This event brought together developers and researchers currently focusing their efforts on finding new ways to scale Bitcoin.
One of the main focus on the conference was on improved ways to bridge Bitcoin to other sidechains or rollups using technologies that leverage Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). Projects building in this direction are a part of the BitVM family, and the motivation for most teams is to bring Bitcoin to the world of onchain finance. Other teams building on BitVM have other motivations such as improved privacy.
Fun fact, most projects using “ZK” aren’t actually using ZK at all. See this thread for a quick explainer 😊
Ark was another important topic of discussion during the three-day event. Core Ark, development teams spent their time explaining the advantages and the trade-offs of the protocol, how it could be used to bitcoin scaling.
It was not only Ark and bridges, but other interesting research topics were discussed, ranging from using Bitcoin as the base layer for a p2p credit system to Bitcoin-quantum questions. You can view all of the talks via our stream for Day 1 and Day 3.
Garbled Circuits was one of the primary talking points at Bitcoin++ Istanbul — Scaling Edition, and they promise to optimize BitVM implementations various teams are working on.
Most of last week’s discussion revolved around the concept of Garbled Circuits. A Garbled Circuit is a cryptographic protocol that allows two mistrusting parties to prove that a statement is true, without actually revealing the underlying information and without relying on a trusted third party.
As of today, BitVM2, the second iteration of BitVM technology developed by Robin Linus that allows to create bridges from Bitcon to other sidechains or rollups, was based on the use of SNARK verification. However, the cost of including a chunk of a SNARK verifier into a block is costly, due to its size of around 4MB (a whole bitcoin block!). The use of Garbled Circuits reduces the size of the verifier to around 70kb, a x100 improve.
While many teams are launching iterations of BitVM2 on mainnet, many teams have already announced that they will move to a BitVM3-style instance when ready. Research is currently ongoing to bring Garbled Circuit based BitVM3 to the public, due to their superior verification costs.
The hackathon at Bitcoin++ Istanbul — Scaling Edition was a success, with 9 Bitcoin related projects battling to win a 5M sats pool prize, tickets for the next Bitcoin++ conferences and more. The first place was given to Artmak, an Ark-based wallet.
The hackathon saw 9 teams of developers given 3 hours to create the best possible Bitcoin-related project, leveraging AI and vibe coding at full speed. Projects were evaluated using the Olympics Women’s Gymnastics Rubric — a rubric based on routine difficulty (project idea, potential impact of project, ambition), routine execution (project achievement, what was actually built, if it works) and general effect (swag factor, presentation, applicability to the scaling theme).
The first place was given to Artmak, an Ark-based wallet implementation. The aim of the project was to test the performance of Ark and demonstrate its scalability in a creative way. Your favorite open-source reporter’s team won the second place with CoreLLM, an AI agent trained directly on Bitcoin code that aims to help junior developers getting acquainted to its codebase. Third place was given to ZKPoor, a tool that provides cryptographic proof of bitcoin reserves without revealing individual addresses or UTXOs, strengthening bitcoin's culture of verifiable trust.
Other honorable mentions where given to valuable projects according to best design (Artmak), best use of STARKs (Bridgestr), and reality-check award (MergeSyncPi).