Argo: A 1000× Efficiency Boost for Off-Chain Verification
A post by Robin Linus announces the launch of ideal by the creators of BitVM, introducing Argo, a new garbling scheme led by Liam Eagen and Ying Tong Lai that aims to reduce off-chain computation costs by ~1000×.
BitVM2 made Bitcoin bridges possible. BitVM3 cut on-chain costs by 1,000x with garbled circuits. Now @liameagen's breakthrough scheme, Argo, cuts off-chain costs by another 1,000x—making off-chain computation on Bitcoin truly efficient and practical.
— Robin Linus (@robin_linus) January 19, 2026
👷🏻♂️👷🏻♂️👷🏻♂️ https://t.co/8WRAzJ6AbV
eprint.iacr.org
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Argo MAC Garbling with Elliptic Curve MACs
Argo MAC efficiently translates from an encoding of the bit decomposition of a curve point to a homomorphic MAC of that point. These homomorphic MACs enable much more efficient garbling.In subsequent work, we will describe how to use Argo MAC to construct garbled SNARK verifiers for pairing-based SNARKs.