Argo MAC: A 1000× Boost for Garbled SNARK Efficiency
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.