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The race to make Bitcoin programmable without a soft fork has turned into one of the most creative arms races in crypto. 

At the center is BitVM, a framework for proving off-chain computation on Bitcoin via fraud proofs. Its first iteration, now known as BitVM1, used a multi-round interactive protocol. BitVM2 simplified this to a single-round fault proof using a split SNARK verifier, and is already proving practical for early adopters like Build on Bitcoin (BOB), Citrea and Bitlayer.

Now, BitVM3 proposes to go even further by cutting onchain fraud proof costs by ~1000x. But there’s a…

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