July proved to be a banner month for efforts to scale Bitcoin using zero-knowledge proofs.

First, StarkWare demonstrated a STARK verifier on Bitcoin’s Signet test network on July 17.

Then last week at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, two competing teams behind BitcoinOS and BitVMX verified zk proofs on Bitcoin mainnet. Both make use of BitVM, or “Bitcoin Virtual Machine,” an approach to create Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts without the need for a soft fork.

Read more: Bitcoin research expands on design space for smart contracts

A key difference between the two approaches is the degree of trustless execution, according to L2 Iterative Ventures’ Weikeng Chen, who…

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