ZK on Bitcoin with Alpen Labs

SummaryIn this week’s episode, Anna and Tarun chat with Sims Gautam and Liam Eagen from Alpen Labs. They dive into the world of Bitcoin L2s and focus on how ZK can be used to incorporate strong connections between Bitcoin and new execution environments. The group then explores BitVM, covenants, the distinction between the Bridge Operators and sequencers in this model and how this differs from how these actors work in Eth L2s. They then dive into SNARKnado, including what is happening under the hood, the ways in which this system offers round-based fraud games mixed with ZK and which agent provides DA and more. Here’s some additional links for this episode:Bulletproofs++: Next Generation Confidential Transactions via Reciprocal Set Membership Arguments by Eagen, Kanjalkar, Ruffing, Nick Bulletproofs: Short Proofs for Confidential Transactions and More by Bünz, Bootle, Boneh, Andrew, Wuille, and Maxwell Zcash Website Protogalaxy: Efficient Protostar-style folding of multiple instances by Eagen and Gabizon cq: * Cached quotients for fast lookups by Eagen, Fiore and Gabizon Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin by Miers, Garman, Green and Rubin Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin (extended version) by Ben-Sasson, Chiesa, Garman, Green, Miers, Tromer and Virza Monero Ring SignaturesBlockstream Whitepapers Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity by Ben-Sasson, Bentov, Horesh and Riabzev Ordinal Theory by Casey Rodarmor BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin by Robin Linus BitVM 2 BitVM Website Jeremy Rubin Blog on Lamport Signatures Introducting SNARKnado by Alpen Labs ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon