StarkWare, an Israeli company known for its Ethereum layer-2 solutions StarkNet and StarkEx, has announced a major initiative to enhance Bitcoin’s capabilities using zero-knowledge rollups.
The company has committed $1 million to research and development for this effort, highlighting its dedication to improving Bitcoin scalability.
StarkWare’s solution centres around StarkNet, a decentralised and permissionless rollup system for Ethereum. Rollups aggregate numerous transactions off-chain and verify them on-chain at a fraction of the typical cost, a method that has proven effective on Ethereum and is now being adapted for Bitcoin.
“Bitcoin today is powerful, but it has the potential to be so much more,”
said Eli Ben-Sasson, CEO and co-founder of StarkWare, in a statement.
“By scaling Bitcoin, we can unlock blockchain’s full potential to transform the world.”
A key part of StarkWare’s plan is a proposal to reinstate a Bitcoin command known as OP_CAT. This command allows developers to set conditions for future Bitcoin transactions, enabling features like automated payments and reversible transactions, similar to smart contracts on other blockchains.
StarkWare has already started testing zero-knowledge proofs on Bitcoin through the ZeroSync Association in Switzerland. This technology allows users to validate the Bitcoin network without downloading its entire history, ensuring a more efficient and scalable system.
The company noted that it has partnered with Weikeng Chen of L2 Iterative Ventures (L2IV) through the ZeroSync Foundation to develop the Bitcoin Wildlife Sanctuary. The project leverages both teams’ engineering and research expertise to advance open-source work on OP_CAT-based covenants and STARK verifiers implemented in Bitcoin scripts.
Advocates of the OP_CAT proposal have introduced new code, showing how this command could enhance Bitcoin’s functionality. The proposal has gained attention from the community, and it has been christened with the meme number “420” as its proposed Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) number.
READ MORE: What is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)? And How Does It Work?
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