SP1 Is Bitcoin Ready: The Era of ZK on Bitcoin Has Begun
Succinct and BitVM are powering native zero-knowledge proof verification on Bitcoin. Digital gold is more programmable and extensible than ever.
BitVM is a computing paradigm that expresses Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts. It requires no changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules: instead of executing computations on Bitcoin, BitVM simply verifies them.
Succinct now supports hashing public inputs with BLAKE3, the most efficient hashing algorithm for BitVM verification. This means that SP1, Succinct’s market-leading zkVM, is optimized for Bitcoin. Any developer can use zero-knowledge proofs on Bitcoin, unlocking a range of new cases.
We’re one step closer to proving the world’s software. Succinct’s decentralized prover network can generate a zero-knowledge proof for any software system, from blockchains and bridges to oracles and beyond.
BitVM Unlocks New Use Cases for Bitcoin
Bitcoin’s scripting language is intentionally non-Turing-complete: it optimizes for an efficient and reliable instruction set that handles basic transaction logic. This simplicity, however, comes at a cost. Developers cannot natively build complex applications on Bitcoin without introducing new trust assumptions.
BitVM makes Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts possible by optimistically verifying proofs through a challenge-and-response model. This unlocks general-purpose computing in a Bitcoin-native way, allowing developers to build applications like trust-minimized rollups, sidechains, and bridges.
SP1 Is Now Optimized for Bitcoin
Verifying zero-knowledge proofs on BitVM isn’t easy.
Bitcoin Script only allows arithmetic operations on 32-bit words. There’s no way to split longer bytestrings into smaller ones, so BitVM cannot use the native OP_SHA256 opcode. To get around this, BitVM implements a hash function in pure script, and the BLAKE3 implementation is roughly five times smaller than the SHA256 version. This is partly because BLAKE3 is a simpler hash function: SHA256, for instance, requires 64 rounds of compression while BLAKE3 only requires seven. In addition, thanks to careful stack management, BLAKE3 can process large inputs up to 1024 bytes without exceeding Bitcoin’s stack limit. As a result, BLAKE3 is cheaper to verify than SHA256 on BitVM.
By supporting BLAKE3, Succinct is making verification on Bitcoin much more efficient. Integrate it with one line of code today.
Leading Teams Are Building on Bitcoin with SP1
Succinct is powering a new generation of ZK applications on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin L2s: Alpen Labs
Alpen is an EVM-compatible ZK rollup that settles on Bitcoin. To connect Alpen to Bitcoin, Alpen’s bridge uses BitVM and SP1 to verify a ZK light client of their state transition function and deterministic fork-choice rule directly on Bitcoin.
Trust-minimized Bridge for Babylon Genesis
Babylon’s Bitcoin staking protocol enables trustless staking of Bitcoins to secure Babylon Genesis and other blockchains. To further enable trust-minimized liquidity for Bitcoin, their team is developing an SP1-powered Bitcoin light client that is verified directly on Bitcoin, facilitating seamless peg out transactions for Babylon Genesis.
New Token Standards on Bitcoin: Nubit
Nubit is building Goldinals, a trust-minimized fungible token standard that unifies Bitcoin’s fragmented asset ecosystem on Bitcoin Thunderbolt. Through BitVM and the Succinct Prover Network, Goldinals enables onchain verification of token operations without relying on centralized indexers — a key limitation of prior token standards on Bitcoin.
Private Coins on Bitcoin: ZeroSync
ZeroSync is building zkCoins, a novel design that scales Bitcoin by combining client-side validation with ZKPs to achieve strong privacy and scalability. By shifting most verification complexity offchain with Succinct and enabling peer-to-peer communication between participants, zkCoins eliminates the need for a global UTXO set, enables transaction privacy, and supports hundreds of transactions per second without sacrificing decentralization.
Build on Bitcoin with Succinct
Succinct is powering the next generation of Bitcoin applications. With SP1’s native support for BLAKE3 hashing, Groth16 proofs can be affordably verified on Bitcoin through BitVM.
We’re working with the most forward-thinking teams in the space, and we’re just getting started. If you’re building with ZK on Bitcoin, please get in touch.
