announcement · zk

zkBitcoin: Use Zero-Knowledge Applications (zkapps) on Bitcoin

David Wong January 31, 2024 1 min

zkbitcoin

In collaboration with Σ0, we released a new primitive called zkBitcoin, which allows for the creation of zero-knowledge applications (zkapps) on Bitcoin via a minimal layer 2 protocol that uses Bitcoin as data availability layer and a committee of participants to perform threshold signatures.

This is a significant milestone for the Bitcoin ecosystem as it augments the capability of the Bitcoin scripting language allowing for larger and more complex application. In addition, it unlocks privacy-preserving applications for Bitcoin.

We're currently running on testnet, and you can try it out by downloading the zkBitcoin CLI.

You can read the whitepaper here, which describes the two types of zkapps that can be created, stateless and stateful, while providing more details about the protocol overall:

If you like videos, you can watch an overview of the project:

a walkthrough of the whitepaper:

and a walkthrough of the codebase:

We're excited to see what people will build on top of zkBitcoin. If you're interested in running a node for the network, or interested in using the protocol for your own application or L2, shoot us a message!

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