Computing on Bitcoin #80
March 13, 2026 - Week 10
Welcome to a new edition of Computing on Bitcoin News.
The pace of innovation around Bitcoin continues to accelerate as researchers and builders push the boundaries of what can be computed and verified on-chain.
Let's dive in.
Bitcoin Devs share a short animated explainer on garbled circuits, the technique powering BitVM3’s efficiency improvements for verifying computation on Bitcoin.
Garbled Circuits explained
— Bitcoin Dev Project (@Bitcoin_Devs) March 7, 2026
Next Up: How BitVM 3s uses Garbled Circuits pic.twitter.com/88kIzhipl1
Alpen Labs introduces Duty-Free Bits, a technique that makes arithmetic garbling schemes Bitcoin-compatible with up to 98.8% smaller encodings. The work improves garbled-circuit constructions used in BitVM-style protocols like BABE and Argo.
alpenlabs.io/blog
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Shrinking Glock: Duty-Free Bits
A line of recent work has explored how to enable more expressive protocols on Bitcoin without requiring changes to the base layer. One promising direction uses garbled circuits to move expensive verification logic off-chain while preserving the ability to produce fraud proofs if something goes wrong.
GOAT Network argues that AI agents could accelerate Bitcoin adoption, citing research showing many models prefer Bitcoin for long-term value. The post highlights Bitcoin L2 infrastructure, such as BitVM2 bridges, as key for enabling agent-driven economies.
alpenlabs.io/blog
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AI Agents Will Push Bitcoin Further Than Humans Alone
The next major expansion of Bitcoin may not come primarily from billions of humans independently reaching monetary clarity. It may come from a different class of economic actor altogether: AI agents.
The pace of research and experimentation across the Bitcoin ecosystem continues to accelerate, and the design space for Bitcoin-native computation keeps expanding.
We’ll continue tracking the ideas shaping the future.
See you next week!
-The Fairgate Team