Computing on Bitcoin #72
January 16, 2026 - Week 03
Welcome to the latest edition of Computing on Bitcoin News!
The pace of innovation around Bitcoin’s trust-minimized infrastructure keeps building.
Here are the latest updates shaping what's next.
Fairgate published a research post introducing APoW, a proposed Proof-of-Work design that makes mining effort auditable to mitigate block withholding attacks in mining pools. The paper outlines how auditable mining could enable stronger security guarantees and more decentralized pool architectures through verifiable work attribution.
fairgate.io/publications
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APoW: Auditable Proof-of-Work Against Block Withholding Attacks
At the core of APoW is the concept of v-mining (verification mining). A miner can be assigned to re-scan the same nonce space previously explored by another miner, using a modified PoW condition based on pattern matching rather than leading zeros.
Off-chain cryptography enables more expressive smart contracts for Bitcoin. A new primitive, Argo MAC, developed by Liam Eagen (Aperiodic Labs) and Ying Tong Lai, dramatically improves the efficiency of garbled SNARK verifiers,achieving up to a 1000× reduction in circuit size. It works by translating curve point encodings into homomorphic MACs, streamlining the process of verifying SNARKs through garbled circuits.
Congratulations to @liameagen and @therealyingtong for dropping another 1,000x (literally) to garbled circuits. Significant breakthrough for ZK verification on Bitcoin.
— David Seroy 🏔️ (@david_seroy) January 14, 2026
Any other team claiming 1,000x is just using their work 🙃.
True chads.https://t.co/xnmrCQhO6v
Cryptology ePrint Archive
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Argo MAC: Garbling with Elliptic Curve MACs
Off-chain cryptography enables more expressive smart contracts for Bitcoin. Recent work, including BitVM, use SNARKs to prove arbitrary computation, and garbled circuits to verifiably move proof verification off-chain. We define a new garbling primitive, Argo MAC, that enables over more efficient garbled SNARK verifiers. Argo MAC efficiently translates from an encoding of the bit decomposition of a curve point to a homomorphic MAC of that point.
BlockEden published an overview of the emerging BTCFi landscape, examining the race among Bitcoin Layer 2 projects to enable DeFi-style functionality on Bitcoin. The article compares approaches across Babylon, Lightning, Stacks, and hybrid designs, highlighting BitVM-based bridges as a potential path toward trust-minimized Bitcoin DeFi.
blockeden.xyz/blog
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BTCFi Awakening: The Race to Bring DeFi to Bitcoin
Bitcoin's scripting language is intentionally simple. Satoshi Nakamoto prioritized security and decentralization over programmability. This made Bitcoin incredibly robust—no major protocol hack in 15 years—but it also meant that anyone wanting to use BTC in DeFi had to wrap it first.
Xangle published an in-depth research report on BOB, analyzing its role in evolving Bitcoin from a store of value into a financial execution layer for BTCfi use cases. The report examines BOB’s hybrid L2 architecture, dual-bridge approach, and the integration of BitVM to enable trust-minimized, Bitcoin-native financial infrastructure.
xangle.io/research
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BOB: From digital Gold to Financial Engine
BOB: From digital Gold to Financial Engine
Thanks for reading this edition of Computing on Bitcoin News.We'll be back soon with more protocol deep dives, research updates, and ecosystem progress from across Bitcoin's frontier.
-The Fairgate Team