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BABE: Verifying Proofs on Bitcoin Made 1000x Cheaper

eprint.iacr.org · 304 words · saved by 1 readers

Endowing Bitcoin with the ability to verify succinct proofs has been a longstanding problem with important applications such as scaling Bitcoin and allowing the Bitcoin asset to be used in other blockchains trustlessly. It is a challenging problem due to the lack of expressiveness in the Bitcoin scripting language and the small Bitcoin block space. BitVM2 is the state-of-the-art verification protocol for Bitcoin used in several mainnets and testnets, but it suffers from very high on-chain Bitcoin transaction fees in the unhappy path (over $14,000 in a recent experiment). Recent research BitVM3 dramatically reduces this on-chain cost by using a garbled SNARK verifier circuit to shift most of the verification off-chain, but each garbled circuit is 42 Gibytes in size, so the off-chain storage and setup costs are huge. This paper introduces BABE, a new proof verification protocol on Bitcoin, which preserves BitVM3's savings of on-chain costs but reduces its off-chain storage and setup costs by three orders of magnitude. BABE uses a witness encryption scheme for linear pairing relations to verify Groth16 proofs. Since Groth16 verification involves non-linear pairings, this witness encryption scheme is augmented with a secure two-party computation protocol implemented using a very efficient garbled circuit for scalar multiplication on elliptic curves. The design of this garbled circuit builds on a recent work, Argo MAC, which gives an efficient garbling scheme to compute homomorphic MACs on such curves.

Paper 2026/065 BABE: Verifying Proofs on Bitcoin Made 1000x Cheaper Dimitris Kolonelos, University of California, Berkeley Mikhail Sergeevitch, Babylon Labs Srivatsan Sridhar, Byzantine Research David Tse, Byzantine Research, Stanford University Abstract Endowing Bitcoin with the ability to verify succinct proofs has been a longstanding problem with important applications such as scaling Bitcoin and allowing the Bitcoin asset to be used in other blockchains trustlessly. It is a challenging problem due to the lack of expressiveness in the Bitcoin scripting language and the small…

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