PRESS RELEASE.
Oakland, United States, January 28th, 2026, Chainwire.
GOAT Network today announced the public release of the GOAT BitVM2 Testnet (Testnet V3), a Bitcoin-native zkRollup test network designed to make BTC usable for everyday financial activity without relying on custodians, federations, or committee-controlled withdrawals.
Bitcoin is not a niche asset anymore. It is a multi-trillion-dollar holder base with limited ways to use BTC without handing control to someone else. That constraint has shaped the entire market: Bitcoin is held, but if productive activity even happens at all, it happens under various trust assumptions. A Bitcoin-native zkRollup changes that by giving BTC a path to be used and to earn yield while keeping final enforcement on Bitcoin.
Unlike Ethereum, Bitcoin’s base layer is intentionally minimal and does not provide a flexible environment for verifying complex proofs, which is why “Bitcoin-native Rollups” were widely treated as impractical. Most systems marketed as “ Bitcoin L2s” still fail where it matters: when something goes wrong, Bitcoin itself cannot force the correct outcome. If a withdrawal depends on operator signatures, committee cooperation, or majority liveness, then the user does not have control of their BTC. GOAT Network is designed around a stricter requirement: users must be able to exit back to Bitcoin under Bitcoin’s rules – without permission.
“The Bitcoin Layer 2 market hasn’t truly started. Until now, the so-called ‘ Bitcoin L2s’ are simply sidechains or custodial bridges. They lack essential attributes like permissionless exit or mainnet-level dispute resolution, which are requirements for BTCFi to be credible.” – Kevin Liu, CEO of GOAT Network
GOAT BitVM2 builds on the BitVM2 approach, taking it beyond theory and using Bitcoin’s existing primitives – pre-transactions, one-time signatures, and time locks – to create a practical enforcement mechanism where false claims can be challenged and driven to a Bitcoin-enforced resolution.
Building on previous Testnets, which validated the BitVM2 model within a Type-1 zkEVM running environment with real-time proving, Testnet V3 is a public environment for GOAT Network’s full Bitcoin-native zkRollup stack, introducing GOAT BitVM2 in production for the first time. Execution happens off-chain, validity is proven with ZK, and Bitcoin is the enforcement layer for disputes and exits. The testnet focuses on making the dispute system operational, integrating the end-to-end pieces required for a deployable system.
To do that, the system anchors sequencer authority and ordering to Bitcoin (via a decentralized sequencer) and binds withdrawals to that Bitcoin-anchored history, preventing withdrawals based on an alternate or fabricated transaction history. It supports arbitrary-amount withdrawals designed to complete without fragile user-side processes and will soon introduce a dispute construction engineered to reduce worst-case work that must land on Bitcoin, using a garbled-circuit-based approach paired with a designated-verifier SNARK – keeping enforcement economically executable.
The broader stack includes an Ethereum-equivalent execution environment (Type-1 zkEVM), a decentralized sequencer architecture designed for network sharing with sustainable yield economics, and ZK proving driven by Ziren, GOAT Network’s own audited zkVM proving engine.
The GOAT BitVM2 Testnet is live and open for public testing.
Full article: goat.network/blog/goat-bitvm2-testnet-native-bitcoin-finance-is-here
Testnet onboarding/docs: docs.goat.network/users/goat-bitvm2-user-guide
Developer dashboard: bitvm2-test4.goat.network/dashboard
GOAT BitVM2 whitepaper: https://www.goat.network/bitvm2-whitepaper
Project overview: goat.network
GOAT Network is building a Bitcoin-native Rollup stack aimed at enabling BTC-denominated financial activity with dispute resolution and exits that are enforceable under Bitcoin’s consensus rules.
GOAT Network’s full suite of BTC yield options can be found at yield.goat.network.
Contact:
This article was first published on Bitcoin.com:
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