BitcoinOS Just Brought The First ZK Proof To Bitcoin: Here’s Why That Matters

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Freelance Journalist

Andrew Throuvalas

Freelance Journalist

Andrew Throuvalas

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Andrew is a journalist and content writer with a passion for Bitcoin. His work has been featured with Cryptonews, Decrypt, CryptoPotato, and Bitcoin Magazine, among others.

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July 24, 2024

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Bitcoin “superlayer” protocol BitcoinOS has now verified the first zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) on Bitcoin, executing what most in the industry once thought couldn’t be done on the oldest blockchain network.

BitcoinOS Brings ZK Proofs And Rollups To Bitcoin

This achievement, performed at Block 853626 on Tuesday, marks a significant step forward in scaling and enhancing the functionality of Bitcoin while maintaining its foundational principles of decentralization and stability.

Specifically, the team behind BitcoinOS claims that this breakthrough will enable the implementation of rollups, which are layer-2 blockchains allowing faster, cheaper, and more versatile transactions. These transactions can subsequently be settled on the more secure layer-1 Bitcoin blockchain, inheriting base layer security.

We have done it! For the first time ever a ZK-proof has been verified on Bitcoin Mainnet by BitcoinOS.

The final verification was confirmed in block 853626.

A historic moment and a historic block.

A new era has begun for Bitcoin enabling unlimited scaling and functionality -… pic.twitter.com/x8akim4SJh

— BitcoinOS (@BTC_OS) July 24, 2024

“This is the first permissionless upgrade of the Bitcoin system and the first time Bitcoin has been upgraded without a soft fork,” said Edan Yago, core contributor to BitcoinOS. “This paves the way for more developers to build on Bitcoin more efficiently and enables true decentralization.”

Unlike previous scaling solutions, BitcoinOS aims to enhance Bitcoin without compromising decentralization. With ZKPs, BitcoinOS has demonstrated that developers can create covenants – conditional Bitcoin payments that only execute after providing the right cryptographic proof.

In practice, this enables developers to build bridges to transfer BTC to and from an L2 rollup environment with extremely minimal trust assumptions.

By comparison, existing technologies like sidechains require user trust in a small, centralized federation not to steal their BTC. Meanwhile, though the lightning network allows for fast decentralized payments, it quickly trends towards centralization in practice due to fundamental UX challenges surrounding channel management.

BitcoinOS will include a decentralized, dynamic operator set to uphold an extremely resilient rollup bridge for verifying bridge transactions.

“Under this model, all threats to the system, even from a coalition of nation-states, would be defeated by the system’s cryptographic assurances,” BitcoinOS said.

Crypto Fragmentation and Consolidation

BitcoinOS

will also enable trustless interoperability between several different rollups, providing a highly liquid and functional playground for users and developers that all feels like one blockchain.

“In every single industry that is innovative… At the beginning of the innovation, many new kinds of platforms are built,” said Yago to Cryptonews. “But then as scale is reached, and as technological parity is reached, the entire industry shifts from a meta of fragmentation into consolidation.”

According to Yago, BitcoinOS will enable the entire crypto ecosystem to evolve from a series of fragmented L1s into a consolidated tech stack built on Bitcoin – the largest and most secure blockchain.

Best of all, this innovation will be able to occur permissionlessly. The blockchain need not be forked to innovate via rollups, allowing Bitcoin’s base layer to remain a secure form a “permaware” that it is widely valued for.

“The most valuable feature [Bitcoin] needs to have is reliability,” Yago said. “[Bitcoin] really doesn’t change much at all, and that’s exactly what makes it reliable. That’s what keeps it simple.”