Building Universal Computation Solutions on Bitcoin
About Fairgate
Fairgate is a research pioneer in the field of Privacy Enhancing Technologies and Multi Party Computation. Inspired by our strong commitment to unlock Bitcoin’s full potential, Fairgate is a key contributor to BitVMX and it is focused on the development of innovative solutions able to capitalize on the tremendous power of this new computing paradigm.
From BitVM to BitVMX
In 2023 Robin Linus discovered BitVM, a clever mechanism to use the current Bitcoin scripting system to verify arbitrary conditions and restrict bitcoin spending based on those conditions, assuming miners cannot censor transactions. The proposal was soon expanded from the two-party setting to N-party protocols. While BitVM (a.k.a. tapleaf circuits) was only of theoretical interest, soon afterwards, he proposed two improvements that make it practical: BitVM1 and BitVM2. We pushed the research forward with BitVMX, improving both pre-computation, on-chain vbytes consumed, round complexity and design simplicity.
BitVMX is a new framework to optimistically execute arbitrary programs in Bitcoin based on the N-party disputable computation paradigm pioneered by BitVM. BitVMX framework provides the foundations to run any CPU on Bitcoin, with a focus to run a fully-compliant RISC-V processor programmable using a standard compilation toolchain. Working with its partners and the community, Fairgate is creating the first secure, extensible, open source and token agnostic smart contracts platform on Bitcoin.
This revolutionary framework can be used to develop blockchain bridges, aggregator oracles and SNARK/STARK verifiers. As soon as BitVMX is able to run a SNARK verifier, a myriad of new use cases can be brought to Bitcoin, from ZK-rollups to crazy use cases such as Zero Knowledge Contingent Payments (ie: autonomous bug bounties paid for disclosure of vulnerabilities).
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The Security Tradeoffs of Validating Bridges
Building a secure bridge is one of the most difficult tasks in the crypto ecosystem. While there have been new developments in Bitcoin bridge designs, such as schemes relying on BitVM2 or BitVMX, the core problem remains the same.
