BitVM: The Holy Grail for Bitcoin? | Creator Robin Linus

Today on the show, we’re exploring the frontier of ZK Rollups on Bitcoin! The Bitcoin L2 landscape is standing on the shoulders of this technical implementation called BitVM. We brought Robin Linus, one of the author’s of the BitVM White Paper, to not only dive into how BitVM got started, but more importantly, what it means for the future of Bitcoin. ------ 🎬 DEBRIEF | Ryan & David unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-the-robin-linus-interview ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/14?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance 🏠 CASA | SECURE YOUR GENERATIONAL WEALTH https://bankless.cc/Casa 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐 TRANSPORTER | CROSS CHAINS WITH CONFIDENCE https://transporter.io/ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 5:03 Who is Robin Linus? 10:20 Why Bitcoin? 16:19 Bitcoin Needs to Scale 22:15 BitVM Eureka Moment 24:31 The State of BitVM 27:19 BitVM vs Ethereum Rollups 33:45 How Does BitVM Work? 46:07 BitVM Critiques 55:07 The Bitcoin L2 Space 59:33 The BitVM Endgame 1:03:07 The Future of Bitcoin 1:07:09 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Robin Linus https://x.com/robin_linus Robin Linus Website https://robinlinus.com/ BitVM https://bitvm.org/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

  Welcome to Bake List, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on the show, we are exploring the frontier of ZK rollups on Bitcoin through the lens of the BitVM. You might be familiar with the Bitcoin Layer 2 landscape. This has been a thing that has been very hyped in development in the Bitcoin world over the last year or so. All of that technical innovation is standing on the shoulders of this technical implementation called the BitVM, which promises to enable true, uncompromised, trustless Bitcoin Layer 2s. We are bringing one of the authors of the BitVM white paper, Robin Linus, on the show today to talk about how he got into the world of building the BitVM, and exactly how it works, and what it strictly enables under the hood, and how

• 1:16Speaker 01

  it is the same, or also different from the Ethereum rollups that you may be familiar with.

• 1:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  This, at least to me, I don't know, David, if you agree, is one of the most exciting projects I've ever heard of on Bitcoin, because it promises to create a, just a ton of innovation and scale on top, including kind of a robust rollup-type ecosystem, and all sorts of things can be built on top of BitVM to sort of scale this. So, some have described this to us as the Holy Grail for Bitcoin scalability. So, it's very exciting to hear Robin describe that here today. Guys, we will get right to the episode with Robin Linus about BitVM, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including our recommended crypto exchange for buying your Bitcoin, and that is Kraken. Go create an account.

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• 4:13Speaker 01

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• 4:56Speaker 01

  similar to those that we would find on a dedicated smart contract chain. Robin, welcome to Bankless.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  Hi, thanks for having me.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  So Robin, I know you primarily as the BitVM guy. So I'd actually like to get to know you a little bit more. What's your background with Bitcoin? How did you come to become working on the BitVM? Just tell us a little bit about yourself.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, together with my co-founder Lucas, we founded a nonprofit company called ZeroSync. And the goal of ZeroSync was just broadly to apply zero-knowledge proofs to Bitcoin. Because yeah, obviously zero-knowledge proofs are the future. And we kind of saw a lack in Bitcoin, like nobody was really applying them. And yeah, that's why we founded that nonprofit company. And we started out building a chain state proof, which is essentially a way to compress the chain and sync faster. So that you essentially can sync on a phone or something. And yeah, while playing with these zero-knowledge proofs,

• 5:57Speaker 00

  it became apparent that it would be awesome to have some kind of CKP verify on the main layer as well. But back then Bitcoin was like trending towards ossification a lot, like.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Jeremy, Jeremy Rubin, just tried to activate CTV and, well, he failed with that. And the sentiment in the entire community was pretty much against any kinds of forks back then. And, um, yeah, so then the idea came up. If there is some way to hack a ZKP verifier into Bitcoin as it is. Because, um, yeah, Bitcoin has that scripting language, which is very limited. But hardly anyone can tell what it can do and what it cannot do. And so it was a very interesting research question. What we can do with it and can we build a ZKP verifier with that?

• 6:50Speaker 00

  And, yeah, for the better part of 2023, um, me and a couple of friends just bounce off ideas of each other. What could be possible? We researched different ZKP schemes. And, um, yeah, it seemed like nothing really works because, yeah, there is that script size limit. You can have at most four megabytes of script because the block size is four megabytes. So your script can be at most four megabytes. And that sounds a lot, but it's actually very little because script is so limited. For example, there is no multiplication, like the most simple thing, multiplying two numbers is not possible natively in Bitcoin script. What you can do though is stuff like addition. And then when you can do addition, you can compose multiplication.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  But then you need a lot of obcodes and then your, your, the script size blows up very quickly. And, um, yeah, so we figured out that it's not really possible to just build a ZKP verifier directly in script. And, um, then I thought it's just not possible. But two of my friends, namely Super Testnet, yeah, a couple of other guys, we founded a group, um, a Telegram group. And, um, they keep pushing. They, they were totally convinced that there must be some way to activate, uh, to implement a ZKP verifier in Bitcoin script. And I thought, actually, it's nuts, but, uh, I liked reading what they were saying.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  And then at some point, um, somebody came into the group who, who talked about optimistic verification. Um, the MAD proposal, maybe you've heard of that. Probably Ethereum people are not that familiar with it. It's Merkleize, all the things it's called. And, um,

• 8:33Speaker 00

  When I dug more deeply into that, it became apparent that something like that should be possible in Bitcoin script as it is right now. And then I started playing around and then I built like a first version that was very limited and didn't really solve the problem. But after a week or two, it just suddenly became obvious how to do it. And then SuperTestnet started building prototypes and he actually started telling everyone about it and everybody got excited. So I just wrote very quickly a white paper and pumped it out and yeah, suddenly BitVM was a thing.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Where would you say you get your like engineering chops from? Were you a cryptographer by trade before discovering crypto? Or did you, or did you learn cryptography through Bitcoin? Like where is some of your like technical competency come from?

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I studied computer science. I was always very interested in math as well. But like I started out more like building apps, web apps and more like on the user interface side of things. I also like design a lot. And when I started to work on Bitcoin, it became obvious that it doesn't really scale. It doesn't really work as money because it's just too expensive and too clunky. And the more I tried to solve that, the more, yeah, the more I had to think about cryptography. And then I really learned how much, how much I love it actually.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  And then I started absorbing everything I could learn about it and started talking to all these great Bitcoin engineers on IRC, like Peter Weller and so on, Andrew Polster. And yeah, I started learning more and more about it. And then at some point I decided that I really want to make that my career.

• 10:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Rob, and there's many different systems. You could be applying your, your career and your talents to, to scaling. Most people who are in Bitcoin are passionate about Bitcoin in particular. So we, we've talked about kind of like how you got here, but we asked the question of why are you here? Like, why is it even important to scale Bitcoin?

• 10:42Speaker 00

  I'm in it for the money.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  But what I mean by that is I actually care a lot about the design of money. I think it's the most fundamental system of society. And I see in particular Western societies on a decline. I see it here in Germany, I see it in the US as well. Just look at the president candidates, like both of them are pretty nuts. And I think this kind of shows that our societies are not in a very healthy state. And on the other hand, I see countries like China rising, where they don't care about human rights at all. They think it's an inefficiency that we should get rid of. And that concerns me a lot. And I think most of these issues are rooted in the monetary system.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  I think fiat money is a scam. I think it's a form of cancer to society. I think most people suffer from it, even though not consciously, even though they don't notice that it's that. Maybe now they notice more after like this huge inflation in the recent years.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  But in general, I think most people are getting robbed of their time. I see it also very clearly here in Germany. When I look at the buildings that are like 150 years old, they're very beautiful, very like a lot of love to pay to the details. They are very high quality, they're still standing today. And if I compare to the things that we built today, I see, well, there's a huge difference. It's something changed. And I think the difference is very deeply rooted in hard money. I think hard money is much more healthy for society, because when there is hard money, everybody has an incentive to serve the market as best as possible.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Whereas in the fiat money system, everybody has an incentive to get as close as possible to the money printer. And that's, yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  Essentially destroys all the healthy incentives and creates lots of disincentives that are leading to unhealthy societies. And I think Bitcoin is the best shot to fix that, even though it's a huge dream that is not that realistic maybe, but I think it's worth trying.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  I love the answer of being in it for the money because of the actual properties of money. But also, I think part of your answer, Robin, is that you're in it to scale the money. Like, that's what you want to do. But you do that via technical matters. So like, there also is no meaningful differentiation between being in it for the money, in it for the tech. It's all kind of the same thing. I'm wondering if you kind of can help square something. The idea that hard money is going to fix a lot of society's problems, I think is a pretty interesting thing about crypto that brings a lot of people into the world of Bitcoin. But you've also just told us a story of the difficulty of actually using Bitcoin technology to scale, which is why you're working on the BitVM. Do you have

• 13:40Speaker 01

  any perspectives about that particular aspect of Bitcoin? Very technically difficult to work with, but very strong monetary properties. So how do you think about Bitcoin's technology as its ability to scale itself? Like, you're running into roadblocks with a BitVM. We'll talk about like where the BitVM is in its development. But like, technically constraining, correct? But yet nonetheless, very strong money. But as a developer on Bitcoin, people generally feel not empowered to be able to do technical scaling. How do you kind of square these two things?

• 14:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, of course, you're right. On the other hand, I think it is Bitcoin's most distinguishable feature that it is that hard to change. Like, it's really, there is no centralized control. There is no foundation that runs it or so. It is, I think, in my eyes, it's a good thing that it is that rigid and

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Solid, but on the other hand, yeah, it is, it can be draining when things are going that slow.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Of course, like in particular, in my situation where I was that excited about C K Ps. And then I see like in the altcoin world, essentially everything you want, you have it immediately on the on the base layer. Because Vitalik wakes up in the morning, makes a hard fork. So it's kind of like a perspective from the Bitcoin world. And of course, like for for research, that is much nicer. And we have seen this like Cambrian explosion of proof systems in the altcoin world. We haven't seen that on Bitcoin really, and Bitcoin could not fund it. And the Bitcoin community was not that strong in in that regard.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  On the other hand, I think now that it has been shown without like beyond any reasonable doubt that this is the way forward. Like that we need proof systems. The Bitcoin community has accepted that and now we are looking for ways to get them into Bitcoin as well. And yeah, BitVM is one approach. Of course, it's clunky. It's a hack. It's it's it's not a nice straightforward way as we see it in Ethereum or something. But it's like really quite hacky way. But it already shifted the overton window a lot. And I think it's just a matter of time. And I think Bitcoin is already so far ahead, like the brand is already so strong that it doesn't really matter if it takes two years more, that's that's it's totally fine.

• 16:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Rob, Robin, I think there might be some in Bitcoin circles that are still unconvinced that we actually need to scale in the in the way that you're talking about. So I remember the Bitcoin standard books, Safi Dean, a moose, right? It was you was talking about it's it's fine, like the, you know, the five to 10 transactions per second are kind of fine. You'll have like big whales, you'll have banks kind of like do these things. But it's it's sort of Bitcoin is a settlement network and like we don't really need that much scale. There could be just like big whales and kind of like super users who actually Really settle things on chain. And then you have another camp that has said before, like, hey, lightning is a good approach for most scalability. And yet there's this kind of, at least David and I have sort of observed this new tribe

• 17:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  of Bitcoiners who are kind of like the builders, who are very excited about these new proof type methods and applying, you know, ZK and layer twos to the scalability challenges here. Not everyone's on board with like the need to scale trustless, you know, transactions on Bitcoin. What would you say to that crowd? Like, what is, like, why scale in general? Like, why can't we just have Bitcoin as it is and kind of like scale and it just like side chains or lightning network? Like, why even need ZK proofs and BitVM tech?

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the camps are more like Bitcoin as an asset and Bitcoin as a currency. And some people think Bitcoin as an asset is fine and it should be an asset and that's it. And we shouldn't care too much about currency. I think Michael Saylor is actually the most prominent example of the asset camp. And I totally disagree with that. I think it would be an absolute failure. Like, if it would be clear that Bitcoin is just an asset, I would quit today. I think that's totally not inspiring to work on. I think we need better money and that's, that's why I'm in it.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  And, well, my personal perspective is that I don't want to convince them at all. That's why I built BitVM. It's permissionless. Like, I can just build on Bitcoin. I don't have to ask anyone for permission. Michael Saylor can like it, or he can dislike it, but it doesn't really matter at all. If it catches on, it catches on, then he cannot stop it. And I think that's fine. I kind of wonder why people like Safteen, like Safteen Amouz, the author of the Bitcoin Center, why he's talking about these things? Because his book sounds more like as if he would want us to use hard money and not

• 18:59Speaker 00

  just Bitcoin as an asset. So it doesn't really make sense to me that he's having this position. But yeah, as I said, like, it doesn't really matter at the end because it's a permissionless system and we can build on it. And

• 19:16Speaker 00

  What we are doing with BitVM shows that there are ways to do it without asking others, or like without finding consensus among the entire community.

• 19:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's a good explanation, good way to like kind of delineate the camps. There's those that believe that Bitcoin should just be an asset, or you know, like that's kind of what they're most interested in, those that believe it should be an asset and a currency. I think you fall into that camp. There was another camp that felt that way too, back in 2017, and they forked off and they did the Bitcoin Cash type thing. It was a departure in terms of how they thought about Bitcoin the asset, but also their philosophy for how to actually scale this. And I'm guessing you're not sort of in the big block philosophy, because you've stayed with Bitcoin, and you're trying to scale the network as is with these four megabyte blocks, and you know, do it via ZK proofs. But talk about that. Why didn't you go fork off and join the Bitcoin Cash crew,

• 20:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  who is also talking about like Bitcoin should be a currency, a means of payment, and not just an asset? Why have you stayed with Bitcoin up until this point in time?

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Well, I think there is only one Bitcoin. And I'm not that set on the block size as it is right now. I would be open to discuss block size increases. I totally see the counter arguments. I totally think that most people should be able to run full nodes and sync within a reasonable amount of time. And I think that is a very fundamental property of Bitcoin, and we should not relax that, we should not harm that. But on the other hand, computers are improving a lot. Internet connectivity is improving drastically.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  And over time, we can definitely increase the block size safely, I think. If we can do it right now, or if we should do it in a couple of years. It's open for debate, but in general, I don't think it's like a bad idea in general. I think it is definitely worth talking about that. And even back then, people like Adam Beck said that it makes sense to like double the block size in, I don't know, five year intervals or something like that. And I don't like, I think there is kind of like a trauma, trauma in the Bitcoin community because of that block size was that it became like kind of a stigma to even talk about

• 21:49Speaker 00

  it and to, to mention it at all. And I kind of understand where this is coming from, but I feel like the new generation of Bitcoin developers like me or like the people that I hang out with, they are way more open to these ideas. And I think it would be fine to increase the block size over time.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  I'd like to hop back into the BitVM conversation. You, when you were explaining it and your background and the progress that you've made so far, there was a eureka moment of sorts, I think, with the optimistic proving. Can you, can we walk us through that moment? Like, what was that eureka moment? Keeping in mind that Ryan and I and our audience aren't that technical and the places that we are technical are usually in the Ethereum context. So like explaining like we're dumb, can you walk us through the eureka moment of the BitVM that you had?

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the eureka moment was when I realized that you can introduce stateful scripts by using Lempot signatures. In Ethereum, statefulness is like totally baked into the system. It's like the most normal thing to have like a contract that sets some variable to some value. And then like the next person who calls the contract has the same value for that variable. That is something very basic, that is, yeah, totally fundamental to any, any advanced smart contracting language. And That is the thing that was non-existent in Bitcoin. In Bitcoin, every script is completely stateless.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  The execution of one script is completely independent of the execution of another script that is following. And that was kind of like the fundamental hurdle that we had to overcome. And yeah, the key idea was that we can use Lampard signatures to do that. And Lampard signatures is a very simple signature scheme that is just based on hash functions. And we do have hash functions in Bitcoin script. And Lampard signatures are so simple that we can express them in Bitcoin script. And that was known already for quite some time, but nobody has thought about how to use it for smart contracts. That was my eureka moment when I discovered that we can use these kinds of signatures to transport state from one script to another.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  So that the execution of one script depends on the execution of another script. And that was essentially the key mechanism that enabled everything else.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  And enabling everything else goes to actually allowing the Bitcoin blockchain to verify a proof. And if we can get the Bitcoin blockchain to verify a proof, then we unlock like a world of possibilities.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  For what it's worth, in the Ethereum land, there's also on the roadmap, the idea of enshrining a ZK circuit into the functionality of the layer one. So that like whatever is ZK circuit that we decide fits inside of the actual layer one protocol, it can do its job of securing proving layer twos, amongst other things. And this is the same conversation in the Bitcoin landscape. It's just the technical properties of the layer one is different. And so that's an engineering challenge to be able to get Bitcoin to verify a proof, which unlocks that world of possibility. Where would you say is the BitVM in its development? Are we still in the research phase, still trying to like do some solving of some hard problems? Are we in the engineering phase?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  How would you say, where is the BitVM on its completeness?

• 25:35Speaker 00

  We are very much in the engineering phase. We did a lot of research. January and February, I was in Stanford, working with a group of David Che. And we improved the original design a lot and made the bridge design much more simple and also the verification permissionless, so that everybody can challenge incorrect statements. And I think we have a very solid foundation now. The research is pretty advanced. And we started implementing it already a couple of months ago already.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  And yeah, we do have a complete cross-16 verifier, so like a Snark verifier that we implemented in Bitcoin script. Yeah, now we have to kind of like massage it into the BitVM2. And yeah, that is one, that's the last, that's the final step to make it work. And I think within the next two months, like hopefully by the end of August, we will have at least a testnet version running of BitVM2. And hopefully by the end of the year, we will have a reckless mainnet. So it's mostly an engineering thing right now. And it's relatively straightforward.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  So there is no huge unknowns that we don't know how to solve or so.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's no, there's no big hurdle to get across. It's really just about like putting in the work, typing, typing the code into the system, making sure the system works. Maybe there's unknowns, unknowns, but as far as like it's known, you feel confident that this is a workable solution and it's just a matter of building it.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Robin, just some maybe dumb questions really quick. So will BitVM require a hard, like any sort of fork, soft fork, I should say, of Bitcoin or any additional OP codes? So you know, like Eric Wall has talked about OP Cat, that kind of thing. Will it require those upgrades?

• 27:36Speaker 00

  No, that's the, that's the entire sales point of BitVM essentially, that it works without a soft fork. Of course, there are soft forks that make it more efficient and that can solve a couple things about the clunkiness, but.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  The system works without any software.

• 27:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Because that's very cool, because listeners may have seen recent news that the Starkware ecosystem is going to support like their ZK rollup type environments in Bitcoin. But in order to do that, they need OPCAT, which is new op code to be deployed to Bitcoin. And there's no ETA for when that would actually be deployed. BitVM, in contrast, does not require that. Can you go through for maybe some of the people who are familiar with how rollups work in Ethereum? And I don't know to what extent you're like, you, I'm sure you, I'm sure you know all of this of how it works in Ethereum. But what is, what is the analog? Is this sort of like an optimistic rollup in Ethereum where there's some sort of like,

• 28:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  you know, fraud proof type game? And you can, you can kind of launch an entire, say, virtual machine chain on top of BitVM that ultimately gets settled down via this fraud proof mechanism to, to the Bitcoin settlement network and establish your kind of like trustless settlement guarantees that way? Like, how similar is this to what we might think of like optimism or Arbitrum, which are Ethereum-based optimistic rollups? What are the similarities and differences here?

• 29:15Speaker 00

  In general, what we are trying to mimic is just a regular rollup. But that is not really possible. So we are doing like a couple of workarounds to get there. And one thing that makes it way more efficient is that optimistic approach. So we are essentially combining like an optimistic rollup with a snark. And that is because that verifying the snark on chain is very expensive. It costs roughly like the size of a block of script that you have to put on chain. And of course, we don't want to do that in practice. So what we do is that we have just like one round of.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Optimistic, like this optimistic challenge response game, where the operator, who is like the party who runs the bridge,

• 30:08Speaker 00

  they essentially, they make a claim, they claim, hey, I witnessed a valid peg out and now I am going to take money out of the bridge. And everybody can see if that claim is correct or if it's incorrect, just from looking at the chain, to see if the correct data in the chain. And if it's incorrect, then everybody can challenge them. They can just say, hey, okay, I don't believe you. Let's go down the unhappy path and let's execute the snark and prove to me that you're actually right, which should be impossible if the person is lying, if the operator is lying. Yeah, that makes it way more efficient in practice, because as long as the operator is not lying, which should be always the case, because he's heavily disincentivized.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  Because if he is caught lying, then he will lose a lot of money. So in practice, it will be just, he makes a statement, a correct statement, and then that's it, nobody challenges it, and it looks like a regular transaction on the main chain. And only in case there is like an operator going bonkers and totally wants to lose his money, then they make an incorrect claim and then you can punish them for making that incorrect claim. And then you have to execute all these huge scripts. But that's not that bad, because always the lying party will pay for the script. So if the operator is lying, he will essentially pay for his own trial.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  And yeah, so the hope is that, similar to in Arbitrum, the incentives are just aligned in a way that in practice, you never have to go down the unhappy path.

• 31:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  And who are these operators? Is this like a permission set of operators, or can it be permissionless?

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is probably the biggest drawback in comparison to like a standard rollup. In BitVM, you need these operators. And that is because, yeah, you don't really have like that EVM that just can run contracts. You have to have a party that runs the contract. And that's why we have to have like a set of operators, for example, 100 operators that are determined during setup. And they will be responsible for running the bridge.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  They are like semi-trusted, they are trusted, like there is the trust assumption that one of them is honest and live. And as long as one of them is honest and live, everybody will always get their money and the bridge will be safe. Even if they're all dishonest, they cannot steal from the bridge. Because everybody can challenge them and there will be somebody who has an incentive to challenge them. Like some user or an exchange or whoever has like an incentive that the bridge doesn't break. So even if all the operators are dishonest, they cannot steal, but they can hold the system. Yeah, and that is the main issue.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  But not even the game theory works out for them to collude to, let's say, they could all collude and then bribe the people or blackmail the users to essentially saying, hey, we will stop the system until you give us that amount of money. Also, even that doesn't really work out game theoretic, from a game theoretic perspective. Because if one of them defects, then everybody gets their money. So it's quite a safe assumption, but of course, it would be way better if we could get rid of that.

• 33:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, I think people are getting the picture of this if you're coming from kind of an Ethereum vantage point of, it sounds very similar to an optimistic rollup with some of those constraints. And just to be clear, with BitVM, like the project itself, are you launching a chain? Or are you just like kind of developing the protocol and leaving others to kind of like develop various, you know, chains, rollup chains on top? What's the role of BitVM? Are you guys doing a full chain?

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Well, in general BitVM is a generic bridge that will work for all kinds of rollups and sidechains and all kinds of side systems. And we totally want others to build on top of it. We want to build an open system and we think the more people are using our implementation, the easier or the faster we can hard our implementation and make it very solid. But I'm personally not that interested in rollups. I am more interested in another protocol that I'm working on with some people from Blockstream Research. The working title is ZKcoins.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  And the idea behind that is it's a client-side validation protocol that is similar to RGB or Taproot Assets. Maybe you've heard of that. Lightning Labs is implementing it. And it's essentially Taproot Assets on steroids because you can improve Taproot Assets substantially by combining them with snarks. And that, in the end, it breaks down. It can improve the base layer throughput by roughly 10 to 20x and it gives us perfect privacy. And that's what I'm most excited about. Also, this is compatible with the Lightning Network and yeah, that would essentially help

• 35:38Speaker 00

  us to increase the on-chain throughput a lot. And also, what's also interesting is like the, it makes it much cheaper to verify these transactions. So a block full of ZKcoins transactions would be way easier to verify for full nodes than a block full of Bitcoin transactions. So you decrease the burden of verification on the mainnet. And yeah, that would be another argument for increasing the block size. And I think like this is the way to scale blockchains in the long run because yeah, it essentially reduces the blockchain to its main function, which is creating an immutable ordering of commitments to prevent double spending.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I'm most excited about and I'm working on that with Jonas Nick and Liam Egan from Blockstream Research. Actually Liam, he is not at Blockstream anymore. He's now at Alten Labs.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  ZK, ZKcoin sounds like a very pure scaling of just the monetary properties of Bitcoin. So it very much aligns with like the in it for the money. That makes the upgrades the tech of the money. So in the Ethereum perspective, I'm wondering if you can kind of like, tell us what a bridge and a layer two, a ZK layer two using BitVM would look like from the perspective of the Bitcoin layer one. If you look at the Ethereum layer one and you want to get your assets on to an Ethereum layer two, you send over your ETH or your stable coins into a deposit contract, into a bridge contract. And then you can look at the state that that bridge contract holds and all of that stuff, all those tokens, NFTs, whatever, are on the layer two, like flying around on that

• 37:22Speaker 01

  layer two. But you can kind of look at the bridge and see, see what's actually on that layer two. Is that how it works with a BitVM? Is there a notion of a bridge contract? Like, what does it, what does it look like from the perspective of the layer one?

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's pretty much the same. Just that the bridge contract is just a multi-sig, like a N of N multi-sig where all these operators, they co-sign it. Like not really the operators, there are these hundred operators. And then there's during the setup, there's a setup ceremony where you have like roughly a thousand people who co-sign the setup. And there's also the assumption that one of them has to be honest and delete their key. And if they are honest and delete their key, then the bridge is safe. If they would all collude, all these thousand people, then they could steal the money. But yeah, essentially it's, you're sending your money to a thousand of thousand multi-sig. That's how you pack in.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  And it looks very simple on the, on the chain. Like it's indistinguishable from, from a regular transaction.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  And for the operator set for a particular BitVM layer two, that gets initialized at the genesis of that particular layer two. Can that, how does, how does someone become an operator? And can that operator set change over time or is it locked in at genesis?

• 38:43Speaker 00

  You can change it over time. Like you could run the setup roughly like once or twice per year or something. The idea is really that the bridge will be relatively slow and clunky, which is fine, because you can just do cross-chain swaps. Like you can just swap from one chain to another. And liquidity providers will probably do that because there is a business for doing that. And most people will never use the bridge themselves. It will be just huge liquidity providers who pack in like, I don't know, 10 Bitcoin or something like that. And then it will just stay in the system. And only if the system really, if nobody wants to use the system anymore,

• 39:26Speaker 00

  then it becomes relevant to get the money back. But more or less, the bridge is just a guarantee that the wrapped BTC or however you want to call it, that they do have a real value and that you can always get them back if you really wanted to. But most of the time, they will be more useful in the side system. And then they will just stay in the side system until the side system dies off.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  What does the actual exiting process look like? Depending on what kind of rollup it is, we're talking about on Ethereum. Optimistic rollups take seven days, but I don't think we're talking about that. We're talking about a ZK rollup. What does it look like to exit the system? How does that work technically?

• 40:03Speaker 00

  That's a good question. Yeah, first step is that, let's call him Bob. Bob packs out and Bob just burns his coins by sending them to a particular address that is somehow defined by the system, some unspendable address, which essentially burns the coins. And it has to be such that everybody can witness that. And then the operator, they have to front that capital for that particular pack out. And the operator just sends their own money to Bob. Let's say Bob packed out 10 BTC or so. So the operator now sends their own mainchain BTC to Bob. And then Bob has his money. And now the operator, they put their kickoff transaction on chain.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  And with their kickoff transaction, they essentially state, hey, all of you saw Bob did a valid pack out. I paid Bob my money, so now I'm going to take money out of the bridge. Because of the nature of the workaround that we are doing. And Bitcoin is very hard to define during the compile time of the contract. Like a dynamic address, like you cannot say this money will go to whoever will be entitled to take the money. You have to be specific who will get the money. And that's why we have to send it to the operator, because the operator is known during the compile time. And that's why we do that swap, that the operator gives his own money to Bob. Bob is not known during compile time, Bob is some random user.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  So the operator gives his money to Bob. That's then the operator is entitled to take money out of the bridge. And the operator's name is essentially in the bridge contract. So we can express that in Bitcoin. So yeah, and he puts this kickoff transaction on chain and that starts a dispute period of two weeks. And within these two weeks, everybody can challenge them. Like if that statement was incorrect, if something was missing, if Bob didn't do a wallet pack out, or if the operator didn't send the money to Bob. Then anyone can challenge the operator. If he's not challenged, then after two weeks, he can just take the money off the bridge.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  If he is challenged, then he has to go down the unhappy path, which means he has to make like a commitment to his trace, his trace of the computation of like the verification of his snacks. So he essentially runs, like he verifies his own snack and then gives us like a recipe and says, those are the intermediate results that I came to. And if any of these intermediate results is incorrect, then you can challenge that particular step. You can just execute the correct script, which is a new script. It's like a slice of the computation and you can just execute it and show what is the

• 42:54Speaker 00

  correct result and show that the correct result is not the same as what the operator claimed. And that disproves the operator and then you can just slash them and take the deposit, the collateral, sorry. And that's essentially how the bridge works.

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• 46:07Speaker 01

  So one nuance I want to get into is the idea that if I'm Bob on the Layer 2 and I just want to exit the system and I make a transaction to withdraw, to exit, I'm actually not getting my Bitcoins. I'm getting somebody else's Bitcoins and then my Bitcoins are going to be paid back to the person who gave me their Bitcoins. And so, this makes the bridge capital-y inefficient because some operator has to take up two weeks of lockup cost of opportunity cost in order to actually facilitate the exit. We were doing a podcast with Eric Wall and he was talking about some of the potential edge cases that this might create just because there might not just be enough capital

• 46:51Speaker 01

  to do a mass withdrawal. I'm unsure about how to articulate the scenario that I remember Eric Wall was talking about, but he was alluding to the fact that this might create an edge scenario in which there's a lot of people asking for money and there's not enough money in the bridge. Maybe you can articulate that edge scenario and whatever thoughts you have.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Well, I asked him on Twitter and he publicly admitted that his attack, like they wrote this nice article about BitVM being fundamentally broken or something.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  I asked him and I had to admit that it doesn't actually apply to our model. It applies to a different model that somebody else is building.

• 47:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, okay.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, to be honest, I cannot take Eric very seriously.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  He's not a builder. I don't know if he has ever built anything. And I think it's always easy to shit on people's things. And there is a lot of politics involved. There is a lot of things with that soft fork that he wants to push through. And it's not really related to my work. It's more a thing that is going on there in the background.

• 48:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  And Robin, when was this back and forth? So I think the conversation that David and I had where he articulated this and it was almost like how just sort of a fatal flaw for BitVM. That was maybe like, I want to think like six weeks ago or so. Is what you're talking about, the back and forth with Eric, like more recent than that?

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there is that CAT thing going on. They are pushing really hard for CAT. And I'm, yeah, OP CAT. I find these guys very suspicious. I like, they're like, hey, I'm here to fix Bitcoin. And I find that not very authentic. Like usually the people who are pushing for soft forks are people who have been contributing for years and have like a very strong proof of work as Bitcoin developers. And that makes them reasonably trustworthy. And if people who don't have any strong proof of work are suddenly pushing for things in particular,

• 49:09Speaker 00

  they are related to this,

• 49:14Speaker 00

  how to phrase it nicely? This altcoin things on Bitcoin.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  They are indistinguishable from spam attacks. And that's another red flag for me. And yeah, so I just use my influence to just ask questions and to

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Show that it's not really solid what they are proposing. And he totally disliked that. And that's how it started, that he started to attack my work.

• 49:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  I see, okay. I wasn't aware that this episode would get a little spicy. But it has, and that's totally great. That's within bounds of a bankless. So just to be clear here, so I think what Eric was also saying is like, he thought that the BitVM designed kind of like, almost like collapses down to sort of like a multi-sig. You almost have to go through this like really messy bankruptcy type process in a mass exit type scenario. And Robin, you're saying that's actually not true. That so we can exit this. It's not all that different from maybe an optimistic roll up on Ethereum in those ways. Maybe just like put a bookend on that critique and why you don't think it applies.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  He thinks it doesn't apply. Like I asked him and he admitted that it doesn't apply to our protocol. And I'm happy if he shows us a flaw in our protocol. I also discussed it with lots of researchers and because like he created lots of waves. Like in that week, everybody asked me about it. And yeah, but it's very hard for me to argue against it because usually when you criticize other people's constructions, then you state how their constructions work. And then you point out particular flaws, but he didn't do that.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  He worked on some hypothetical thing that is totally unrelated to what we are building. And then it's very hard to argue against it when he is confusing terms that much. I think it's just not honest to call it BitVM what he was criticizing there because that is not what we are working on.

• 51:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not at all concerned by that critique.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, there is that capital constraint that is real, but it is not as catastrophic as they made it because they claimed stuff like that. All the operators have to front as much capital as the total value locked, which is totally not true. As I just explained,

• 51:50Speaker 00

  the operator has to front as much capital as a single party needs for like a single unit. Let's say, I don't know, 1,000 BTC is locked and 10 BTC is the unit. Then the operator has to front 10 BTC for two weeks. And if all people want to exit at once, which is also a strange assumption in my eyes, because depending on what you want to use it for, if you want to use it for ZK coins, there is no centralized operator or something, sorry, no centralized sequencer. It is not a realistic scenario to say that there would be a mass exit or so. Just like in Lightning, nobody is talking about mass exits because why should everybody exit Lightning at the same time?

• 52:31Speaker 00

  There is no reason to do that and that's why nobody is concerned about this scenario. And even in Lightning, where there is no capital question at all in that regard, it would be a huge issue if everybody would exit at once, of course, yeah, because the chain space is limited, but that's a totally different discussion.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  A different critique that I think still holds is the actual incentives to front that capital, the business model of being a bridge operator. Two weeks of holding, you know, X number of Bitcoins. Generally, that comes with opportunity cost. What are the incentives being a bridge operator? And like what kind of their earnings potential might they get? Do they get to charge a fee for the service? Like, what's the deal here?

• 53:15Speaker 00

  You simply pay a fee. Like Bob doesn't get actually 10 BTC, he would get, I don't know, 9.5 BTC or something.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Is that determined by the market?

• 53:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just determined by the market. You make an offer to the operator. Also, if actually all people wanted to exit at once, which as I said, won't happen. I don't see a reason for that. Then you can still incentivize the operator to prioritize you by just paying a higher fee.

• 53:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  And there's many, many operators and so they're competing on fees.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. They're competing on fees. And also like the higher the fees are, like if actually all people wanted to exit at once, then it would be kind of natural for them to expect to pay higher fees. And even if there would be a liquidity issue, then the high fees would be quite a convincing arguments for other people who have liquidity to give it to the operators, because the operators would immediately make a profit from it. So it's like a perfect business model. Like you just give me the capital for two weeks and you will get more money back. So these fees are essentially the solution, even if there would be that mass exit case, which I think will not happen.

• 54:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Rob, what type of entities do you expect these operators to be? Say like these 100 operators, are these kind of like some market maker types, right? Are we looking at like, you know, like a jump capital or something like that? You know, is that the type of entity? Or yeah, who will they be? And I don't know if you even have kind of like examples of who you expect to be one of the 100. But yeah, what's just sort of the profile of an operator?

• 55:00Speaker 00

  I think very similar to the liquidity providers on Lightning. It's essentially the same business.

• 55:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Got it. Okay, cool.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  So there are a lot of projects out there that are branded as being a Bitcoin Layer 2. That's kind of one of the Bitcoin Renaissance themes that we've seen in the last year or so. And there's a lot of skepticism about some of these projects. There's also a lot of excitement out of these projects, but one common theme is like all the projects say like, oh, we're going to use the BitVM.

• 55:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  All of them.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  All of them, yeah.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  Generally, what do you think about this category? I would imagine like that's actually kind of the point of what you're trying to build. But also some of these Bitcoin Layer 2s are not real, is the critique. I'm wondering if you just like high level thoughts about the whole entire category of Bitcoin Layer 2s these days.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  I'm not very proud of having created this kind of Layer 2s.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  If I compare it to Lightning, like, uh, there are many points of critique of Lightning. I also, I'm not the biggest fan of Lightning. I do think it is a great project, but it's not really solving the issue at hand.

• 56:13Speaker 00

  But like these other L2s, most of them are very sketchy in my eyes.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Like, in general, there is that thing in the crypto industry that, um, when there is a hot topic,

• 56:28Speaker 00

  there is hype, and when there is hype, then there is easy money. Like, people want to invest. People think there is that opportunity to, like, make a quick hundred X or something. And then there are always projects who are exploiting that, who are selling

• 56:46Speaker 00

  stupid ideas to greedy investors. And I think that's what we are seeing there mostly.

• 56:54Speaker 00

  I don't want to talk about all of them. There are a few exceptions who are doing great work and who are contributing a lot to BitVM as well. I don't want to name names because I don't, like, I did that in the past and, uh, then I heard they're selling tokens with me endorsing them allegedly, which, uh,

• 57:15Speaker 00

  I didn't like, um, like, I don't like tokens in general, or like, I don't like tokens without a clear business model. I think it's totally fine if you sell tokens, if it makes sense. If there is a clear business model behind it, then I mean, I will not buy your token, but it's okay to sell it. But if the token is the only business model, then I think it's pretty sketchy. And, uh, we are seeing that a lot with BitVM L2s and I don't like them at all. I think it's bad. I think it's also, it harms the brand.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  We've seen cycles like this play out before. People love tokens in crypto. They love to play with tokens. They love to speculate on tokens. Optimistically-

• 57:57Speaker 00

  It's a casino, yeah.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  It is a casino, right. And optimistically, that also does create meaningful projects. Like, this is the financing of what hopefully could become meaningful Bitcoin Layer 2s. Is this the path that you see some of these Bitcoin Layer 2 projects on? It's like, well, once we get past the degenerate gambling phase at the end of that tunnel, we'll end up having some like functioning, like quality Bitcoin Layer 2s. Is it a fair to call this like just a deal with the devil? Or like, how do you think about this?

• 58:25Speaker 00

  I don't want to make any deals with the devil myself. Like, all these investors came to me at first, and I told them, "Go. Please leave me alone."

• 58:40Speaker 00

  But yeah, I mean, I see your point. In general, also like as someone who is active in that CK scene, I see many of these CK companies who are doing amazing research. They do have tokens, and I don't think their tokens make any sense at all. But if they would have not that token, then they probably would not be able to pay all these brilliant researchers. And so it is kind of like a double-edged sword. Like, on the one hand, I'm profiting from these scams. And on the other hand, I would not, I don't want to participate in them myself.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  But yeah, I think in the long run, there will be Bitcoin L2s, and probably some of them will make a lot of money. And maybe that justifies the hype or the extreme interest of these investors.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's always interesting. Like, we had Casey from Ordinals and Ruins on the podcast, you know, like a while ago, and he was basically saying, "Yeah, I think a lot of the, like, the tokens, 99% of the tokens supporting this thing are just like dogshit." And he's still building, you know, still kind of a builder in the space. So, you know, I sort of hear that sentiment from Bitcoin builders, like, quite a bit. They're not necessarily proud of what is built on top of it, at least in the early.

• 59:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Early stages, but at the same time, you guys are, BitVM is a permissionless protocol. So you don't get to decide. It's like not on you to decide what actually gets deployed there. And so, I mean, that's an interesting, I guess, tension to have. But let me ask this from the other perspective, which is if, if this went perfectly and you had kind of your vision of you're in it for the money, scaling the money. Let's say that, right? What would you love to see deployed on top of BitVM? Does it look like an ecosystem of rollups, kind of like similar to Ethereum? Is it more along the lines of ZK coins? If you were to just fast forward five years from now in your perfect world,

• 1:00:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  what would you see on top of BitVM? How would Bitcoin look?

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, ideally, the chain would be full of ZK coins transactions, which are completely private and very compact. And yeah, people could use Bitcoin as money again, as it used to be before the blocks, before the scaling wars.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  And yeah, we would have privacy and could use it very well for money, for payments. And I think it would enhance the Lightning Network a lot if we had 20x more throughput on the base layer. So that's opening and closing channels would be quite cheap, like in the order of cents. And hopefully, it would also inspire people or like it would convince people that it's a good idea to increase the block size. And then we would be already quite close to scaling Bitcoin as a global currency.

• 1:01:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Before the block size is increased, in a world where BitVM is used quite heavily and quite significantly, are, you know, like Bitcoin blocks, just like are the four megs full of kind of like these proofs? You know, how much will this affect mainnet, do you think? And like, what will the Bitcoin fees be on mainnet as a result of this?

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  It's hard to say. I mean, they will always be married to regular transactions. I think all these institutions who are just using Bitcoin as an asset,

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  they will want to do regular transactions just because the technology is much more hardened. The ZK coins would be very novel. It will use all kinds of novel proof systems, which have like novel implementations, novel assumptions that are not on the base layer as well. And so I think there will always be a market for regular transactions as well, just because the main system is just more solid, way more solid. And it will take a while until ZK coins will not be considered experimental anymore. Just like Lightning, in the beginning, everybody knew Lightning was like, they even called it the reckless version of Lightning, right?

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  So I guess we will have a reckless version of ZK coins first, and maybe there will be hiccups, and maybe people will even lose some money. But that's just the way these protocols evolve, I think.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Well, this has been definitely one of the more interesting eras in Bitcoin history over the last like 18 months or so. And it's just very refreshing to see building come back to the space and kick some of the laser-eyed Maxies out to the curb and replace them with people actually developing and creating value and growing the Bitcoin movement that started in 2009. I'm wondering, Robin, is there anything else that's going on in Bitcoin, outside of the BitVM and the Bitcoin Layer 2 space that you're paying attention to and you're excited about? Like, what else should we investigate?

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, another thing that I find cool is I was working with David Shae on like his group at Stanford on Bitcoin-backed proof of stake, which is essentially a way to stake Bitcoins in the main chain such that you can derive side-chain consensus from these state coins.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  David Shae, that's the founder of Babylon?

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Ah, okay. Correct. Okay, cool, cool.

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  I'm not related to Babylon at all, but I've worked with them on like David and his research group at Stanford on their paper. And actually, the thing is very related to some research that I did in 2020. And yeah, I like that. I think once we have the base layer, I think the base layer has just a limited capacity. We cannot scale it indefinitely. So at some point, we will have some kinds of side systems. And I think these proof-of-stake side chains, like Bitcoin-backed proof-of-stake side chains, they can be very interesting. And I'm very happy to see that they are building it.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  So if we were to fast forward 20, 30, 50 years, and your ideal version of the universe played out, when it comes to Bitcoin, what does Bitcoin, the system, look like?

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  The optimistic scenario is definitely that Bitcoin will absorb the entire Bitcoin market. And that we will have like one proof-of-work chain, and that will be the anchor for all other systems. And then we will have like a couple of side systems around that. And I guess it would make sense that they are all interconnected with something very similar to Lightning, or just Lightning Network. And yeah, I think in the long run, the entire financial system will be run on some Bitcoin-backed system. As we are seeing currently, BlackRock, like Larry Fink, he's very eager to create like a new exchange where you can trade like

• 1:05:47Speaker 00

  stocks essentially as tokens. And yeah, I think, well, I'm not sure if they really need Bitcoin. Like, an exchange is just like a centralized party, and they could just have coin, have just keys co-signing some, some side chain similar to Liquid or something. I guess that would make more sense from a technical perspective. But I think the most optimistic scenario would be definitely that Bitcoin becomes the world-leading currency, will replace the dollar, and

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, people will use Bitcoin as they are using the dollar nowadays. That would be my hope. And hopefully, hopefully, yeah, the biggest hope I have or like the, what I'm dreaming of is that Bitcoin will be able to defeat central bank digital currencies because I think they are really evil. I think this is the most evil technology that has ever thought of.

• 1:06:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  That clarity of vision is something I've always appreciated from the Bitcoin community. And let me say, like, I think bankless is definitely cheering Bitcoin builders on towards this endeavor. Because what you just described, if we can make it happen, is a bankless money system. This is the entire reason why we're here. I think this is the, one of the central goals, maybe the most important goal of crypto for sure. Robin, just one last question to kind of round this out. So David asked you earlier about kind of like when mainnet sort of timelines. Can you get like concrete with us to the extent that you can on that? Because a lot of Bitcoin layer twos are saying, hey, like, you know, BitVM will be available now. It's already available even.

• 1:07:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  And I think that there's some work to do. So when do you expect to get BitVM online and deploy it in terms of dates? And like, what's going to happen next with the project?

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, hopefully, we can complete our implementation by the end of August. Such that we will have on Signet or like on Testnet, the first version running. So that we can actually run or like verify the first C K Ps on Bitcoin chain. And from there, we hope to complete a reckless mainnet version by the end of this year. That would be the main goal. Like, that is the focus of our team currently.

• 1:08:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's huge. That would be what Bitcoin's 15th birthday around that time?

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  Around that time, yeah.

• 1:08:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Very good. Robin, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a fantastic discussion.

• 1:08:21Speaker 00

  Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

• 1:08:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, got to remind you, of course, at the end, none of this has been financial advice. None of us here are shilling tokens. Of course, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's now the frontier of Bitcoin. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.