Computing on Bitcoin #41
May 30, 2025 - Week 22
A new Friday to share the latest news in the space via Computing on Bitcoin News!
This week, we’re reporting from Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas, where major waves were made: We joined Input Output to debut the first-ever trust-minimized bridge for Bitcoin Ordinals to Cardano — powered by BitVMX and presented live. We also hosted the BitVMX FORCE event, unveiling advances like Transfer of Ownership Protocol (TOOP) and ESSPI, pushing the frontier of secure, decentralized interoperability.
Let’s dive into the biggest headlines from across the ecosystem.
BitVMX enables the first trust-minimized Ordinals bridge from Bitcoin to Cardano, demonstrated live at a major Bitcoin conference. Developed by Fairgate and IO, this cross-chain milestone unlocks Bitcoin DeFi via Cardinal, allowing secure, decentralized movement of NFTs and UTXOs into Cardano's smart contract ecosystem, without custodial intermediaries.
fairgate.io/press
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Bitcoin Ordinals Bridged to Cardano for the First Time with BitVMX Protocol
With BitVMX Protocol Bitcoin Ordinals can now be wrapped and bridged to Cardano via the trust-minimized BitVMX framework, unlocking a $1.5 trillion DeFi opportunity
Jonatan Altszul, CEO of Fairgate Labs, introduces Cardinal: a trust-minimized protocol powered by BitVMX enabling Bitcoin Ordinals to be securely bridged to Cardano. This unlocks cross-chain DeFi by wrapping Bitcoin-native assets as Cardano tokens, allowing use in smart contracts without custodians or address pre-registration.
fairgate.io/blog
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Introducing Cardinal: How BitVMX Bridges Bitcoin Ordinals to Cardano, Unlocking Cross-Chain DeFi
At Fairgate, we envisioned a system where users could manage their Bitcoin assets and interact seamlessly with Cardano’s smart contract ecosystem, without relying on centralized intermediaries or trusting opaque third-party systems. This wasn’t just about connecting two blockchains — it was about creating an entirely new paradigm for asset mobility.
Fairgate’s Cardinal enables trust-minimized bridging of Bitcoin Ordinals to Cardano via BitVMX, overcoming Bitcoin’s programmability limits. Using a decentralized 1-out-of-n honest committee model, Cardinal secures cross-chain ownership without predefined addresses, unlocking DeFi features like staking and lending.
fairgate.io/case-studies
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Cardinal: Cardano Ordinals and Bitcoin Interoperability
“The future of DeFi is cross-chain, and BitVMX exemplifies how Bitcoin can be a foundational layer in this evolution, by combining Cardano’s flexibility with Bitcoin’s security, we open the door to entirely new financial instruments and services.”/nCharles Hoskinson, CEO of IO
Bitlayer has partnered with major Bitcoin mining pools, representing nearly 40% of the network’s hashrate, to work toward the first real-world implementation of BitVM.
medium.com/@Bitlayer
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Bitlayer Partners with Mining Pools Accounting for Almost 40% of Bitcoin Hashrate to Achieve First BitVM Implementation
Bitlayer’s BitVM Bridge stands as a transformative innovation in Bitcoin bridging technology, meticulously developed by Bitlayer and underpinned by the advanced BitVM paradigm.
Currently, the challenge path for BitVM bridges requires NSTs, which is acceptable for Bitcoin consensus but unacceptable for the default Bitcoin Core client.
BitVM's proposed a fix to a historical SPV bug in Bitcoin’s Merkle tree implementation based on a previous proposal by Sergio Lerner. The fix corrects sibling node calculation and addresses SPV vulnerabilities.
https://bitslog.com
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Simple change to the Bitcoin MERKLEBLOCK command to protect from Leaf-Node weakness in Transaction Merkle Tree
Recently a fix to the Bitcoin Merkle tree design weakness in the RSK’s bridge was built by making invalid SPV proofs whose internal hashes are valid Bitcoin transaction. While this solves the problem, it is by no means a “clean” solution: it creates false-negative cases (with very low probability) and it reduces verification efficiency.
Nubit’s Bitcoin Thunderbolt protocol rethinks Bitcoin scalability and programmability by enabling off-chain smart contracts and asset composability directly on Bitcoin
nubit.org/blog
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Starting from Thunderbolt, Re-examining the Design Logic of the Bitcoin Lightning Network
Why Can’t Bitcoin Buy Coffee?
When mentioning Bitcoin, most people first think of its attributes of ‘decentralization’ and ‘immutability’. However, when you actually want to use it to buy a cup of coffee, you will quickly encounter an awkward problem: waiting for transaction confirmation takes longer than waiting for the coffee, and sometimes the transaction fee is even more expensive than the coffee itself. Assets on Bitcoin are still ‘as immovable as a mountain’ — mainly relying on HODL, unable to be lent, combined, or interoperate.
Thanks for reading Computing on Bitcoin News!
We’re excited about what’s ahead after a breakthrough week at Bitcoin 2025 — and even more excited to keep building the future of decentralized computing on Bitcoin together.
See you next Friday with more updates.
The Fairgate Team