The two Holy Grails for Bitcoiners are BTC Yield, and Bitcoin-native security.
BTC Yield has historically come with challenges, with that yield either coming in the form of highly volatile ecosystem tokens rather in BTC, or on centralized platforms, which introduce the risk that you might get FTX’d.
Earlier this year, GOAT Network addressed those challenges, introducing a breakthrough economic model that delivers real BTC rewards to users, with options ranging from self-custody holding to on-chain liquid staking – all in a decentralized blockchain environment.
Likewise, Bitcoin sidechains have long sought to achieve Bitcoin-native security, trying out multiple different technologies to solve the problem. In 2023, a Stanford PhD student named Robin Linus introduced BitVM, a new and promising approach toward adopting Bitcoin security.
Here too, GOAT Network has made strides of its own, launching its BitVM2 testnet as the next step toward growing from a Bitcoin sidechain to a truly secure Bitcoin Layer 2 network.
Today, GOAT Network is proud to launch the next phase of its BitVM2 plans: BitVM2-GC with DV-Snark
GC (Garbled Circuits) is a cryptographic protocol that enables two-party secure computation, allowing mutually distrusting parties to jointly evaluate a function using their private inputs without relying on a trusted third party.
In this protocol, all input and output values are encrypted and stored in a garbled table. Once the garbler reveals the input keys, the output can be decrypted deterministically.
In BitVM2, when an optimistic withdrawal is challenged, the Operator is required to reveal execution traces, and the Challenger must publish a fraud proof. Both steps incur high on-chain costs because expressing execution traces and fraud proofs in Tapscript consumes substantial block space.
BitVM2-GC leverages the GC protocol to reduce the on-chain fraud proof data size by approximately three orders of magnitude. Our work presents a variant of DV-SNARK design, achieving the smallest on-chain fraud proof size among existing approaches and an excellent balance in off-chain complexity.
Tl;dr – this BtVM2-GC development moves us closer to overcoming the technical and computational challenges that so far have prevented Bitcoin protocols from claiming the mantle of Bitcoin-native security.
To learn more about how GOAT Network’s BitVM2-GC works, and what lies ahead for Bitcoiners seeking both BTC yield and the highest levels of security on a Bitcoin Layer 2 network, read on at https://hackmd.io/@goatresearch/BJ3Iim2-Ze
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