Robin Linus Woll, Stanford University and ZeroSync Association; Lukas Aumayr, University of Edinburgh and Common Prefix; Zeta Avarikioti, TU Wien and Common Prefix; Matteo Maffei, TU Wien; Andrea Pelosi, University of Pisa, University of Camerino, and TU Wien; Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos, Imperial College London and Common Prefix; Christos Stefo, TU Wien; David Tse, Stanford University and Byzantine Research; Alexei Zamyatin, BOB
A holy grail in blockchain infrastructure is a trustless bridge between Bitcoin and its second layers or other chains. We make progress toward this vision by introducing the first light-client-based Bitcoin bridge. At its heart lies BitVM2-CORE, a novel paradigm that enables arbitrary program execution on Bitcoin, combining Turing-complete expressiveness with the security of Bitcoin consensus. BitVM2-BRIDGE advances prior approaches by reducing the trust assumption from an honest majority (t-of-n) to existential honesty (1-of-n) during setup. Liveness is guaranteed with only one rational operator, and any user can act as a challenger, enabling permissionless verification. A production-level implementation of BitVM2 has been developed, and a full challenge verification has been executed on the Bitcoin mainnet.
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