Computing on Bitcoin #102
August 14, 2026 - Week 33
Welcome to a new edition of Computing on Bitcoin News.
Here's our curated selection of this week's most relevant developments.
Let's dive into this week's highlights.
Rootstock Labs published its 2026 roadmap, highlighting progress toward Bitcoin-native capital markets, including the BitVMX-powered Union bridge, institutional vaults, tokenized assets, FACON, and further protocol upgrades planned through 2027.
rootstock.io/blog
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Rootstock Roadmap 2026: Building for Bitcoin Capital Markets
2026 has been a defining year for Rootstock.
84% of Bitcoin's hash rate secures Rootstock via merged mining (Q1 2026)
$60M+ in tokenized real-world assets settled on Rootstock (Q2 2026)
Fairgate's CTO Sergio Lerner and CSO Ariel Futoransky presented their latest research, "From Cut-and-Choose to Constant-Size Proofs of Garbling Correctness," at the Workshop on Cryptography for Bitcoin, co-located with the Science of Blockchain Conference 2026. The presentation introduced a succinct proof for garbled circuit correctness with constant verification cost and a STARK-recursive prover capable of processing 25k gates per second on commodity hardware.
Constant-size proofs of garbling correctness — Ariel Futoransky and Sergio Lerner (Fairgate Labs)
youtube.com/@cryptoberkeley
Garbled circuits underpin a growing class of Bitcoin protocols — bridges, vaults, and covenant-like constructions — that express rich spending conditions without consensus changes. These rest on garbling correctness: a verifier must be convinced that a garbled circuit was produced honestly from an agreed Boolean circuit. The standard tool is cut-and-choose, in which the garbler commits to many circuit copies and opens a random subset; verifier communication and storage therefore grow as O(k·n) in the security parameter k and circuit size n.
A post by GOAT Network on X states that Ziren, the zkVM powering its BitVM3 bridge, received an endorsement from a firm that spent seven months trying to break its proof system.
This endorsement comes from the firm that spent seven months trying to break our proof system - Ziren, the zkVM powering our BitVM3 bridge.
— GOAT Network (@GOATNetwork) August 10, 2026
The only kind worth having. https://t.co/Bn2kbvkZDI
A YouTube video examines Bitcoin's BitVM3 bridge design, discussing its role in Bitcoin Layer 2 bridge architecture.
Bitcoin's BITVM3 Bridge #Bitcoin #BitVM3
youtube.com/@informinmotion
There is a PDF on bitvm.org whose first page is stamped RETRACTED - SECURITY BREAK DISCOVERED. It was the most hyped Bitcoin upgrade of summer 2025 - BitVM3, the garbled-circuit design meant to make Bitcoin bridges about a thousand times cheaper to dispute. Within a month, researchers broke it. And then the idea got rebuilt in public - partly by one of the researchers who broke it.
There was a report that Bitcoin’s BIP-110 soft fork attempt stalled after only two blocks due to limited miner support, while critics raised concerns about its impact on Bitcoin’s neutrality, future upgrades, and BitVM-related development.
On August 9, Bitcoin Improvement Proposal BIP-110, which had been pushed forward with great fanfare, saw the fork from start to stall in less than a day due to severe lack of miner support, ultimately becoming a minority chain that no one cares about.
That wraps up this week's edition of Computing on Bitcoin News.
We hope you found it useful and look forward to bringing you more of the latest developments in Bitcoin Computing next week.
The Fairgate Team