Early this year Weikeng Chen The venture partner and its partners L2 Iterative They decided to focus their attention on the booming Bitcoin ecosystem. Chen, who is a Chinese-native, noticed the increasing interest from large mining companies in Bitcoin. They began backing projects within the Ordinals space and Layer 2 space.
“I never really realized Bitcoin had a development community,” He says this half-joking.
He led an initiative to open source last week with support from Infrastructure company StarkwareThe. first implementation A zero-knowledge verifyor using Bitcoin script.
In an area where breakthroughs in technology are rare, the people involved are extolling the importance of this landmark. The zero-knowledge proofs they claim are crucial to unlocking Bitcoin’s programmability, and scaling it globally.
This achievement was made possible by the journey of an unknown outsider, who only six months ago began learning Bitcoin and is now coding arguably Bitcoin’s most sophisticated piece of software. Weikeng Chen was interviewed to learn more about his motivations and collaboration with Starkware on OP_CAT, STARKs and his perspective of this new age in Bitcoin development.
Beginning from Scratch
Chen, a PHD from UC Berkeley who specializes in cryptography explained that he sought an opportunity to use his technical expertise to help his company gain the attention of potential investors. Chen quickly discovered that, despite having extensive engineering expertise, the resources and learning curve were steep. “A lot of the material out there is outdated and does not reflect the current state of development.” He eventually became fascinated with zero-knowledge technologies. research Focus on Bitcoin’s capability to carry out the calculations required to verify zero-knowledgeproofs.
One rabbit hole leads to another Robin LinusWork on novel computing paradigm BitVM His radar was triggered. He was interested in using fraud-proofs to create zero-knowledge system compatible with Bitcoin. After reading the whitepaper, he noticed that some concepts were flawed. “I sent a message to Robin asking a few questions about BitVM. My understanding of BitVM from that whitepaper was indeed dead wrong. I remember Robin’s first reaction was to ask me who had told me this,” He remembers laughing. The interaction between Chen, Linus and other researchers led to a short but fruitful collaboration as they refined the idea and sought ways to improve it.
“It was obvious to me that this method could be used to verify zero-knowledge proof so my work quickly went in the direction of implementing a SNARK verifier.”
Verifiers are cryptographic tools that enable the Bitcoin network to verify proofs of zero knowledge.
This is a great opportunity for OP_CAT
A team from the zero-knowledge giant Starkware also paid close attention to what was happening in the Bitcoin community. It was long overdue for some. Starkware’s founder Eli Ben-Sasson is arguably one of the most influential people in technology. first person to discuss Zero-knowledge tech in context with cryptocurrencies, at an early Bitcoin conferences. Starkware’s ZK STARK technology and Starkware research have been the backbone of many applications for almost a decade.
“Back in 2013, when I suggested using validity proofs to scale Bitcoin, I was hoping Satoshi might still be around and would make it happen faster. Thanks to cryptography visionaries like Weikeng Chen and Bitcoin OP_CAT researchers like Andrew Poelstra and Ethan Heilman, my 11-year old dream feels now within reach,” Ben-Sasson commented.
This month the company announced They are launching a number of initiatives aimed at closing the technological gap between Bitcoins and zero-knowledgeproofs. The application was granted $1,000,000 to explore and research the potentials of this technology. OP_CAT Proposal for soft fork
Some wondered what motivated the enthusiasm. Until recently, the prospects of zero-knowledge technology on Bitcoin had been mostly an afterthought — another OP code that might never see the light of day. It was difficult to get consensus for even small changes in the Bitcoin codebase, making it appear unlikely that anything more complex could ever be achieved.
Starkware contributors have told me that around the middle of May, they became aware of Weikeng’s work on BitVM. The mood suddenly changed. In the end, it turned out the developer already had his eyes on Circle STARKs. Chen identified Circle STARKs technology in a recent paper. “Bitcoin-friendly proof system.”
Both parties decided to join forces and create a joint project to implement a STARK Verifier using the OP_CAT Primitive. “I knew it could be done. We just needed to put all the pieces together,” suggests Chen. Chen.Bitcoin Wildlife Sanctuary” Was born.
It appears that the BitVM project is now two months old and has achieved its objective thanks to Pingzhou Yuan. Chen, who jumped in the Telegram project group late Friday morning to tell the other participants the exciting news: “I think I finished the job!”
The developer then broadcasted the results of his local test. series of transactions To optimize on-chain usage, the STARK proof is based on Starkware’s open-source code. The Stark proof is an open-source Starkware project that optimizes the on-chain utilization. Stwo The implementation is broken down into concurrent transactions and chained with an OP_CAT based Covenant.
On July 12, 2024 at 6:29AM the last transaction was verified on the Signet system, signaling the start of what many believe will be an exciting new phase in Bitcoin’s development.
“This was a tremendous effort and took a significant amount of time,” Chen, said “We started with nothing. There’s no information about ZK proofs on Bitcoin. There’s no information regarding the mathematical operations to follow. We had to build the full stack, which eventually led to the implementation of the STARK verifier.”
The new way to develop
Chen insists that the work isn’t done, despite the positive results. When asked if his foundation work for scaling protocols such as rollups of Bitcoin was an optimistic endeavor, Chen was quick to temper expectations.
“The idea roughly works but the proof-of-concept is not production-ready. Validity proofs also take a lot of block space which might turn out to be expensive in the future.”
Starkware contributors acknowledge that the project faces challenges, but they are confident in its success. “a monumental leap forward” Bitcoin Scaling Solutions that leverage ZK Rollup Technology
The collaboration will likely strengthen the arguments for a possible OP_CAT Soft Fork. Chen says that in order to implement the verifier, he needed to create a framework of covenants which uses CAT. This can be used to demonstrate the versatility and flexibility of the proposed script improvements. Chen believes that other developers can experiment with his code to reach the same conclusions he reached about its advantages.
“I don’t think there is a lot of risk once we have developed best practices. There are not that many places where this is going to go wrong. We now have a clear demonstration that OP_CAT can be adapted to various covenant projects in a safe way.”
The developer admits that he does not know enough about the open-source Bitcoin development to be able to make a contribution to the future activation. He will then share the progress he has made with other members of the Bitcoin development mailing list, hoping that others can provide review and feedback.
Chen, reflecting on his experiences so far in the Bitcoin ecosystem, immediately highlights the importance of creating an environment that is fertile for developers who are new to the system. Because of the lack cohesiveness of vision, he believes there are many talented developers that pass on the chance to create on Bitcoin.
“There is not a clear sense of direction right now which leaves contributors perplexed about their ability to impact the future. Hopefully, the emergence of new tools and primitives can improve this situation so Bitcoiners are allowed to dream again.”
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Source: bitcoinmagazine.com
