Computing on Bitcoin #53
August 22, 2025 - Week 34
Welcome to this week’s edition of Computing on Bitcoin News, your weekly roundup of developments at the edge of Bitcoin programmability.
We surface the most relevant updates from builders, researchers, and protocol designers across the ecosystem to bring you the updates that matter.
Let’s dive in.
Alpen Labs releases Glock, a new garbled-circuit primitive for Bitcoin script locks. Their Glock25 construction with DV-Pari SNARKs achieves up to 550x onchain efficiency over BitVM2.
🔗Glock paper
alpenlabs.io/blog
🔗
Glock is here!
Glocks unlock efficient optimistic verification of arbitrary computation on Bitcoin, providing an elegantly resilient foundation for programmable Bitcoin-based systems that are secure. Glock will eventually secure your BTC deposits to Alpen, allowing you to safely participate in Bitcoin finance.
Bitlayer brings YBTC to Solana via Kamino and Orca, using the BitVM Bridge for trust-minimized BTC. This expands native Bitcoin liquidity and yield opportunities in Solana’s DeFi ecosystem.
blog.bitlayer.org
🔗
Bitlayer Joins Forces with Kamino Finance and Orca, Marking YBTC’s First Entry into Solana Ecosystem
Solana’s high-performance architecture and user-centric design offer significant potential to accelerate innovation and adoption in the growing BTCFi sector. This aligns with Bitlayer’s core goals of delivering enhanced speed, scalability, and decentralization for Bitcoin-native DeFi.
GOAT Research released a draft of BitVM2-GC, merging GOAT BitVM2 with arithmetic garbled circuits.
hackmd.io/@goatresearch
🔗
[DRAFT]BitVM2-GC: Verifiable Arithmetic Garbling
The BitVM2-GC Protocol aims to integrate GOAT BitVM2 —A BitVM2 variant in combination with Decentralized Sequencer to build Bitcoin-native zkRollup— with efficient arithmetic garbled circuits to reduce off-chain communication overhead.
An article in GetsMine News discusses how BitVM is reshaping mining, introducing non-standard transactions and new incentives for pools.
news.getsmine.io
🔗
BitVM and the future of computation in mining: threat or new opportunity?
Until recently, the miner’s task was to maximize revenue by including the highest-fee transactions in blocks. However, with BitVM’s evolution, this approach is transforming. Miners are beginning to consider the computational value of transactions: participating in BitVM scenarios can yield higher aggregate returns due to extra fees associated with executing and verifying computations.
Thanks for reading this edition of Computing on Bitcoin News!
We’ll be back next Friday with more news from the frontier.
—The Fairgate Team