Research

Learn more about Bitcoin Rollup Research and Development

ZK-rollups on Bitcoin were a pipe-dream until 2023. With the recent research around the subject, and the growing excitement around Bitcoin during the recent Ordinals craze, teams are now exploring ways to implement rollups on Bitcoin.

Let's dive into the research and development happening in the space. Below, we cover a few key research and development categories that are driving this new wave of development.

We also provide a list of research papers, Github repos, and documentation sites for you to dive into. You can skip to those here.

Validity rollups on Bitcoin

The Validity rollups on Bitcoin research paper was the first comprehensive breakdown on how we could implement validity rollups on Bitcoin. It is still the most comprehensive report on Bitcoin rollups today, and a must read for anyone interested in the topic.

Read the paper here. You can also read:

BitVM

BitVM is a new computing paradigm that would enable turing complete smart contracts on Bitcoin. In the context of rollups, it could potentially give us a trust-minimized way to bridge BTC, and also optimistically verify rollups' state transitions.

Read the BitVM paper here.You can also read:

An awesome explainer on BitVM
Our blog on why BitVM matters to rollups
See our full list of BitVM resources here

The teams building towards rollups on Bitcoin

There are a number of teams building precursors to ZK-rollups on top of Bitcoin. These teams are taking a number of different design approaches attempting to bringing this technology to Bitcoin, and are moving at an extremely fast pace.

Chainway: A general purpose ZK-rollup leveraging the EVM and a BitVM bridge
Taproot Wizards: A general purpose sovereign ZK-rollup in collaboration with Kasar Labs
Build on Bitcoin (BOB): A general purpose, zkVM rollup exploring BitVM sequencer designs and bridges
Alpen Labs: A general purpose ZK-rollup exploring designs that leverage an "OP_VERIFYSTARKPROOF" opcode
See the full list of teams here.

Opcodes

Teams are optimistic that BitVM can give us a trust-minimized way to develop rollups on Bitcoin without a soft fork. But, adding new opcodes might make building rollups on Bitcoin easier, and give us even more trust-minimized, and potentially trustless, bridging.

The first opcode teams in this space are pushing for is OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (CTV). You can read more about CTV here.You can also check out:

Applications

Rollups are positioned to scale Bitcoin and provide new functionalities to BTC users. These new use cases range from better privacy for sending and receiving BTC, new ways to use BTC as collateral for stablecoin loans, swapping BTC for a number of new asset types, and more.

Read more about new applications enabled by rollups here.