Bridging Bitcoin to Second Layers via BitVM2

Robin Linus; Lukas Aumayr; Zeta Avarikioti; Matteo Maffei; Andrea Pelosi; Orfeas Thyfronitis Litos; Christos Stefo; David Tse; Alexei Zamyatin

Paper 2025/1158 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1158 ↗

Bridging Bitcoin to Second Layers via BitVM2

Robin Linus

Lukas Aumayr

Zeta Avarikioti

Matteo Maffei

Andrea Pelosi

Orfeas Thyfronitis Litos

Christos Stefo

David Tse

Alexei Zamyatin

Abstract

A holy grail in blockchain infrastructure is a trustless bridge between Bitcoin and its second layers or other chains. We make progress toward this vision by introducing the first light-client-based Bitcoin bridge. At its heart lies BITVM2-CORE, a novel paradigm that enables arbitrary program execution on Bitcoin, combining Turing-complete expressiveness with the security of Bitcoin consensus. BITVM2-BRIDGE advances prior approaches by reducing the trust assumption from an honest majority (t-of-n) to existential honesty (1-of-n) during setup. Liveness is guaranteed with only one rational operator, and any user can act as a challenger, enabling permissionless verification. A production-level implementation of BITVM2 has been developed, and a full challenge verification has been executed on the Bitcoin mainnet.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Preprint.
History: 2026-03-04: last updated; 2025-06-18: published
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2025/1158
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1158,
      author = {Robin Linus and Lukas Aumayr and Zeta Avarikioti and Matteo Maffei and Andrea Pelosi and Orfeas Thyfronitis Litos and Christos Stefo and David Tse and Alexei Zamyatin},
      title = {Bridging Bitcoin to Second Layers via BitVM2},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1158},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1158}
}