Computing on Bitcoin #99
July 24, 2026 - Week 30
Welcome to a new edition of Computing on Bitcoin News!
Here’s a quick roundup of the latest research, announcements, and technical developments from across the Bitcoin ecosystem.
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.
Fairgate announced that CTO Sergio Lerner and CSO Ariel Futoransky will present their latest research at the Workshop on Cryptography for Bitcoin, co-located with the Science of Blockchain Conference 2026 at Stanford. Their work introduces a new approach for proving garbling correctness with constant-size proofs, addressing a key challenge behind Bitcoin bridges, vaults, and covenant-like constructions.
Our CTO @sdlerner and CSO @afutoransky (Futo) will be presenting at the Workshop on Cryptography for Bitcoin, co-located with the Science of Blockchain Conference 2026 at Stanford on July 31.
— Fairgate (@FairGateLabs) July 23, 2026
Workshop details: https://t.co/LbyuROWP2O
The paper, "From cut-and-choose to constant-size proofs of garbling correctness," tackles a bottleneck behind Bitcoin bridges, vaults, and covenant-like constructions: proving a garbled circuit was built honestly, without the communication and storage costs of cut-and-choose.
David Seroy, co-founder of Alpen Labs, outlines a vision for an onchain Bitcoin repo market using BitVM-based rollups and Bitcoin-backed CLLOs, arguing they could become a superior form of collateral to traditional repo markets.
finance.biggo.com
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David Seroy: Onchain Bitcoin Repo Will Outcompete the $12T Offchain Market
The repo market — the $12 trillion plumbing system where global finance borrows and lends against pristine collateral — has never been challenged by an outside asset.
“You can rebuild a superior form of repo on top of Bitcoin,” he said. “I think people will see that the economics of what you can build onchain with a Bitcoin-backed repo system is superior to what the economics are offchain in TradFi.”
A new article examines Charles Hoskinson's Pogun initiative, outlining Cardano's plan to bring Bitcoin DeFi through a BitVM-based bridge while analyzing its potential impact on ADA demand and ecosystem adoption.
crypto.news
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Hoskinson wants Bitcoin's money on Cardano. Here's the plan.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has laid out a strategy to bring Bitcoin into Cardano's DeFi ecosystem through a platform called Pogun, targeting the roughly $1.6 trillion in idle Bitcoin.
The mechanism that matters for ADA holders: every transaction in the system requires ADA for fees, paid invisibly by Bitcoin users, creating a demand driver that Cardano's token has lacked.
RootstockLabs published an article arguing that institutional Bitcoin adoption is increasingly focused on productive financial use cases, highlighting Bitcoin-secured payments, tokenized assets, institutional vaults, and BitVMX-based bridge development for Rootstock.
rootstocklabs.com/blog
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Beyond The Headlines: The Truth Behind Institutional Bitcoin Adoption
These firms have a strategy based on real financial primitives, not just a 'number goes up' mentality.
The institutional adoption that matters in ten years is not Bitcoin sitting still. It is Bitcoin working — paying, lending, settling, earning — on rails as trustworthy as Bitcoin itself.
ZKM announced that Ziren, the universal proving toolstack used by GOAT Network's BitVM3 implementation, has completed a Veridise audit and is undergoing a second audit by Consensys Audits ahead of the planned BitVM3 mainnet launch.
The proofs at the center of GOAT BitVM3 are generated by Ziren. After completing a full audit by @VeridiseInc, Ziren is now under a second audit by @ConsensysAudits. GOAT BitVM3 mainnet soon.
— ZKM (@ProjectZKM) July 22, 2026
Thanks for reading this edition of Computing on Bitcoin News!
We look forward to bringing you more updates on the research and innovations driving Bitcoin forward.
The Fairgate Team