Computing on Bitcoin #46
July 04, 2025 - Week 27
Welcome to a fresh edition of Computing on Bitcoin News—your weekly source for the most important updates at the intersection of Bitcoin, zero-knowledge proofs, and programmable infrastructure.
Every week, we highlight key developments, research breakthroughs, and real-world implementations that are transforming Bitcoin into a secure foundation for next-generation applications.
Let’s dive in and see what the ecosystem has been working on 👀
Diego Masini from Fairgate Labs explains how BitVMX brings Bitcoin’s security to complex off‑chain computation. He walks through key components that make up BitVMX — including the Bitcoin Coordinator, Key Manager, Protocol Builder, Storage Backend, Wallet, Message Broker, BitVMX CPU, and the Client.
bitvmx.org/knowledge
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From Blueprint to Backend
BitVMX brings Bitcoin’s uncompromising security into the world of complex off-chain computation. It enables trustless, scalable, and efficient systems that extend Bitcoin's utility without sacrificing its foundations. Our goal is to expand Bitcoin’s programmability through a modular framework grounded in advanced cryptography and Layer 2 innovation.
But BitVMX is more than just a virtual CPU or an on-chain protocol.
The Citrea team shared how they helped BitVM2 bring SNARK verification to Bitcoin — tackling core challenges like elliptic curve arithmetic, hashing, chunking, Winternitz signatures and more, which all power their BitVM-based bridge, Clementine. Now, as Citrea counts down to mainnet, they’re set to launch Bitcoin’s first rollup architecture for Bitcoin.
blog.citrea.xyz
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Citrea’s Role in Achieving Verification on Bitcoin with BitVM
When BitVM2 was proposed, it lacked many components to achieve SNARK proof verification. For this, we needed to identify the cryptographic primitives and optimize these primitives to overcome constraints of Bitcoin scripting language. Citrea contributed to the following major problems to achieve SNARK verification.
blog.citrea.xyz
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Countdown to Citrea Mainnet
There are two technical milestones left until Citrea mainnet. These steps have already started and they are progressing in parallel. In addition to our technical milestones, ahead of Citrea mainnet, we'll have a campaign to invite early users to test Citrea and its ecosystem.
Researchers at DFINITY published a paper titled “Enabling Bitcoin Smart Contracts on the Internet Computer”, where they propose an architecture to run Turing-complete Bitcoin smart contracts directly on the Internet Computer (IC), without relying on bridges.
arxiv.org
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Enabling Bitcoin Smart Contracts on the Internet Computer
In addition to the presentation of the architecture, we provide evaluation results based on measurements of the Bitcoin integration running on mainnet. The evaluation results demonstrate that, with finalization in a few seconds and low execution costs, this integration enables complex Bitcoin-based decentralized applications that were not practically feasible or economically viable before.
BOB launched its BitVM bridge testnet, enabling truly native BTC for Bitcoin DeFi, backed by major institutional and DeFi partners. The bridge will go live on mainnet in Q4 2025
blog.gobob.xyz
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BOB Enables Native Bitcoin DeFi in BitVM Testnet Launch Backed by Institutional and DeFi Leaders
The launch solidifies BOB as the gateway to Bitcoin DeFi by making native BTC, not wrapped representations, available to their extensive Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem. Unlike other Bitcoin variants currently used in DeFi, which rely on centralized custodians or multisigs, BOB’s BitVM bridge uses fraud-proof “1-of-N” security to provide Bitcoin security guarantees. Just as ETH remains "ETH" on Ethereum rollups like Optimism and Arbitrum, BTC on BOB remains native and simply called “BTC.”
StarkWare announces Nexus x S-two, a high-performance STARK prover powering zkVM 3.0 — a modular, general-purpose zkVM built on the RISC-V instruction set designed for scalable and verifiable computation.
starkware.co/blog
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Nexus x S-two: Building the future of scalable zkVMs
At Nexus, we’re building a general-purpose zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) designed for scalability, modularity, and developer usability. Our mission is to make verifiable computation truly programmable by abstracting away low-level cryptography while preserving performance and flexibility.
That’s a wrap for this week’s Computing on Bitcoin News.
Thanks for staying with us as Bitcoin continues its exciting expansion.
We’ll be back next Friday with more research insights, protocol updates, and stories from the frontier of Bitcoin innovation.
The Fairgate Team