BitVM3 Introduces a New Bitcoin Bridge Design
Robin Linus and collaborators introduced BitVM3, presenting a practical trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge based on garbled circuits that reduces worst-case on-chain dispute costs by nearly 1000× while providing a formal security framework and support for Bitcoin rollups.
eprint.iacr.org
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BitVM3: Efficient Bitcoin Bridges via Garbled Circuits
Bitcoin bridges, protocols that lock BTC on Bitcoin and represent it on a secondary system, underpin much of Bitcoin's application layer, yet remain poorly secured.
We present BitVM3-bridge, a trust-minimized bridge architecture from Bitcoin to (i) chains with finality certificates, such as Ethereum, and (ii) Bitcoin rollups.
This paradigm reduces total on-chain costs to approximately $9, with the challenge transaction itself costing just $0.20. This nearly 1000× cost reduction enables smaller bonds, broader operator participation, and smaller deposit sizes.