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A New Era for Bitcoin: Successful SNARK Proof Verification with BitVMX

By Javier Álvarez Cid-Fuentes, Head of Research and Tech Strategy

A New Era for Bitcoin: Successful SNARK Proof Verification with BitVMX

For the first time in history, it’s now possible to interactively verify a SNARK proof on Bitcoin mainnet using BitVMX. 

The team behind BitVMX is announcing today a significant milestone in the BitVM space. For the first time, the team has demonstrated the ability to verify a SNARK proof on Bitcoin mainnet using BitVMX. And unlike different proposals that require OP_CAT, this verification method does not require any change in the Bitcoin protocol.

This achievement marks a groundbreaking development in the realm of Bitcoin and SNARK proofs.

What’s happening?

The team has interactively verified a SNARK proof on Bitcoin using BitVMX.

This means:

  1. Compile Citrea’s SNARK verifier to the RISC-V architecture.
  2. Set up and deposit funds on BitVMX’s challenge-response protocol.
  3. Run the SNARK verifier on our virtual CPU to generate an execution trace.
  4. Publish the final state of the execution trace on-chain.
  5. Challenge the final state and run the challenge-response protocol, which performs an interactive n-ary search on the execution trace on-chain.
  6. Execute and validate the conflicting step of the execution on-chain.

The execution transaction record is available on mainnet

What does this mean for Bitcoin?

This is an important milestone in the development of the BitVMX proving system as the team has been able to challenge and validate the execution of a SNARK verifier on-chain. This can be replicated with any program that can be compiled to the RISC-V architecture as BitVMX provides a general-purpose virtual CPU.

What happens next?

We still need to code key components of the BitVMX proving system. Mainly:

  1. The input of the program is hardcoded right now, but it will be memory-mapped into the processor memory.
  2. Implement the remaining challenges of the challenge-response protocol, such as the memory read challenge
  3. Polish the code
  4. Open source!

Stay in the know

To stay updated about the research and innovations regarding BitVMX, make sure to join the official BitVMX Builders telegram group to follow and contribute to the project’s progress. 

Recommended reading

The first idea of Bitcoin Virtual Machine (BitVM) was brought by Robin Linus in October 2023, and has improved significantly since. 

Explore the concept of BitVM and how it led to the discoveries in BitVMX in this series of research articles: