BABE: Verifying Proofs on Bitcoin Made 1000x Cheaper

Abstract

Verifying succinct proofs on Bitcoin is essential for scaling Bitcoin and enabling trustless use of Bitcoin assets on other blockchains, but remains challenging due to limited scripting expressiveness and small block space. While BitVM2 and BitVM3 have made progress, they suffer from either high on-chain transaction fees or massive off-chain storage requirements (42 GiBytes per garbled circuit). BABE introduces a new proof verification protocol that preserves BitVM3's on-chain cost savings while reducing off-chain storage and setup costs by three orders of magnitude. The protocol achieves this by combining a witness encryption scheme for linear pairing relations with an efficient garbled circuit for scalar multiplication on elliptic curves, enabling practical Groth16 proof verification on Bitcoin.

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