Introducing BTC Warp: A Proof of Concept solution for Bitcoin Light Node Synchronization Issue

BTC Warp: A solution for Bitcoin's Light Node Synchronization Issue.

The Succinct Labs team launched a project called BTC Warp at ETH San Francisco, showcasing a concise and verifiable Bitcoin block header proof to address the light node synchronization issue. By utilizing the succinctness of zkSNARKs, BTC Warp allows new light clients to immediately verify the Bitcoin chain with a storage size of less than 30 kB.

Using zkSNARK, users in computation or network-constrained environments can download and verify small (<30kB) proofs of BTC block headers. This helps make light nodes more accessible and solves synchronization issues. This experiment opens up many use cases, such as relays between BTC and ETH, which would allow any EVM smart contract to verify Bitcoin block headers. Ultimately, our goal is to be able to prove entire Bitcoin blocks, not just block headers.

To prove block headers, we check if the header is below the difficulty threshold, if the parent hash matches the hash of its parent block, and we accumulate the total work of the chain. Our zkSNARK circuit utilizes Plonky2’s recursive proof capability. To parallelize the proof, we created a “proof tree” where each layer of the tree proves the state transition of the block header. As more blocks are produced, we can update our proof to verify the latest block header. The infrastructure is also simple: we use a Nakamoto BTC light client to fetch block headers and use AWS to generate and serve proofs.

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Future work includes further optimizing our SHA256 small tool, supporting circuit serialization to reduce redundant computation, and implementing small tools to verify Bitcoin transactions. We can also improve our infrastructure to further parallelize proof generation.

Reference: https://blog.succinct.xyz/blog/btc-warp#potential-use-cases

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