Earlier this year, waking chin And his partners in the project company L2 recursion They decided to turn their attention to the thriving Bitcoin ecosystem. Chen, a Chinese national, noticed the growing interest in Bitcoin development from several major players in the mining space who started supporting various projects in the Ordinals and Layer 2 space.
“I didn’t really realize Bitcoin had a development community,” he jokes.
Fast forward to last week, where he personally led an open source initiative, sponsored by the infrastructure company StarQuireAnd he achieved First implementation Zero-knowledge verification tool using Bitcoin script.
In an industry where significant breakthroughs are few and far between, those involved in the effort are hailing the achievement as significant. They argue that zero-knowledge proofs are key to unlocking Bitcoin’s programmability and expanding its global reach.
Behind this achievement is an incredible journey from an outsider who started developing Bitcoin just six months ago and has now written the most advanced Bitcoin software ever. I interviewed Weikeng Chen to delve into his motivations, his collaboration with Starkware on OP_CAT and STARKs, and his perspectives on this new era of Bitcoin development.
Start from scratch
Chen, who earned his PhD from UC Berkeley with a specialization in cryptography, explained that he began looking for an opportunity to contribute his technical skills to the industry to better position his company with potential investors and companies. Despite his extensive engineering experience, he quickly realized that resources were scarce and the learning curve was steep. “A lot of the material out there is outdated and doesn’t reflect the current state of development.” His affinity for zero-knowledge technology eventually led to research Focus on Bitcoin’s ability to perform the computations necessary to verify zero-knowledge proofs.
Just as one rabbit hole leads to another, Robin Linus“The idea of working on a new computing model for BitVM popped up on his radar. He was interested in the possibility of using fraud proofs to implement zero-knowledge systems compatible with Bitcoin, so he started looking into the white paper and noticed some problems with some of the concepts involved in the system. “I sent Robin a message asking some questions about BitVM. My understanding of BitVM from that white paper was really wrong. I remember Robin’s first reaction was to ask me who told me that,” he recalls with a laugh. That interaction sparked a short but fruitful collaboration between Chen, Linus, and other researchers as they iterated on the original idea and looked for ways to improve it.
“It was clear to me that this method could be used to verify zero-knowledge proofs, so my work quickly turned to implementing a SNARK verification tool.”
A verifier is a cryptographic tool that enables verification of zero-knowledge proofs on the Bitcoin network.
OP_CAT Opportunity
Around the same time, a team at zero-knowledge giant Starkware was paying close attention to the budding activity coming from the Bitcoin community. For some, it was long anticipated. Starkware founder Eli Ben-Sasson was arguably the First person to discuss Zero-Knowledge Technology in the Context of Cryptocurrencies at the Early Bitcoin Conference. Nearly a decade later, Starkware’s research and ZK-STARK technology serve as the foundation for a growing number of applications in this field.
“Back in 2013, when I proposed using proofs of validity to scale Bitcoin, I was hoping that Satoshi would still be around and make it happen faster. Thanks to crypto pioneers like Wiking Chain and Bitcoin OP_CAT researchers like Andrew Poelstra and Ethan Hileman, my 11-year dream is now within reach,” Ben Sasson commented.
Last month, the company announced that it had begun rolling out several initiatives focused on bridging the technological gap between Bitcoin and zero-knowledge proofs. A $1 million application grant was awarded to research and explore the potential of the OP_CAT soft fork proposal.
The announcement was met with remarkable enthusiasm, leaving some to wonder what was behind the optimism. Until recently, the prospect of using zero-knowledge technology on Bitcoin was an afterthought — another OP token that might never see the light of day. In fact, the difficulty of reaching consensus on even the smallest changes to the Bitcoin codebase made it unlikely that something more complex would ever happen.
Based on conversations with Starkware shareholders, they learned about Weikeng’s progress on BitVM around May and the mood changed dramatically. As it turns out, the developer had already set his sights on the company’s Circle STARKs technology. In a whitepaper released two months earlier, Chen had already described the technology as a “Bitcoin-friendly proof-of-stake system.”
After some consultation, the two parties agreed to collaborate and launch a joint effort dedicated to an open-source implementation of the STARK interrogator using the OP_CAT primitive. “I knew it could be done,” Chen suggests. “We just needed to put all the pieces together.”Bitcoin Wildlife Sanctuary” child.
Two months later, the project appears to have achieved its goal thanks to the collaboration of other developers like Bingzhou Yuan, an early BitVM contributor. Late Friday morning, Chen jumped into the project’s Telegram group to tell other participants: “I think I’ve finished the job!”
After successful local tests, the developer has released series of transactions To Bitcoin’s Signet testnet which will execute the entire script. To improve on-chain usability, the STARK proof was created, based on the open source Starkware software. creature Execution is divided into concurrent transactions threaded together using an OP_CAT-based covenant.
At 6:29 a.m. on July 12, 2024, the final transaction was confirmed on the Signet network, signaling what proponents believe could be the beginning of a new era of development on Bitcoin.
“This was a massive effort and took a lot of time,” Chen said. “We started from scratch. There was no information about the ZK proofs of Bitcoin. There was no information about the mathematical operations that needed to be followed. We had to build the entire set, which eventually led to the implementation of the STARK verifier.”
Inspiring a new path for development
While the results are worth celebrating, Chen insists the job is far from over. When asked if he’s optimistic about his work laying the groundwork for new scaling protocols like Bitcoin’s Staking, the developer was quick to play down expectations.
“The idea works roughly, but the proof of concept is not yet ready for production. Also, proofs of validity take up a lot of space, which may prove to be expensive in the future.”
Starkware shareholders acknowledge the challenges ahead but are confident that the project’s success represents a “huge leap forward” toward Bitcoin scaling solutions that can leverage their ZK Rollup technology.
This collaboration is likely to bolster the arguments for a potential soft fork of OP_CAT. Chen says that in order to assemble the verification implementation, he had to develop a reliable covenant framework using CAT that could serve to highlight the versatility of the script’s improvement proposal. He believes that other developers in the ecosystem could play with his code and come to the same conclusions as he did regarding its benefits.
“I don’t think there’s much risk once best practices are developed. There aren’t many places where things can go wrong. We now have clear evidence that OP_CAT can be adapted to different covenant projects in a safe way.”
When asked about his intention to contribute to the future activation process, the developer readily admitted that he is not fully aware of all the dynamics surrounding open source Bitcoin development. He intends to share his progress with members of the development email list and hopes that others will be able to contribute to the review and provide feedback on his work.
Reflecting on his experience so far, Chen immediately points to the importance of creating a fertile environment for new developers entering the ecosystem. He believes that many talented developers are ignoring the opportunity to build on Bitcoin due to a lack of a cohesive vision.
“There is no clear sense of direction at the moment, leaving stakeholders uncertain about their ability to influence the future. Hopefully, the emergence of new tools and primitives will improve this situation so that Bitcoin users can dream again.”
