Bitcoin is supposed to be {scalable } cash.
{ ideal } champions advanced cryptography to make Bitcoin more private, scalable, and cypherpunk.
Who We Are
Our work centers on the development of private and permissionless Bitcoin scaling technologies, including the advancement of BitVM bridges and their underlying cryptographic primitives.
We work toward { ideal } Bitcoin—not “good-enough Bitcoin”—as a principled undertaking, and welcome partners unintimidated by this quixotic vision.
Current Projects
Argo: Efficient Garbled Circuits
Argo is the industry-leading garbled circuits scheme for off-chain SNARK verification, with benchmarks showing 1000× improvements in size and speed vs. traditional schemes.
| Verifier: | Groth16 |
|---|---|
| Table size: | 16 MB |
| Setup time: | 100 ms |
| Proof type: | Cut-and-choose / validity proof |
| Model: | Permissionless challenging |
Research Papers
Argo MAC: Garbling with Elliptic Curve MACs
Shielded CSV: Private and Efficient Client-Side Validation
Team
Robin Linus
Robin is the creator of BitVM and its later iterations, BitVM2 and BitVM3. He is a PhD student at Stanford, where he researches Bitcoin with a focus on bridging protocols. Robin leads the BitVM Alliance, which built the first mainnet-ready BitVM implementation—used by most existing BitVM-based bridges.
Liam Eagen
Liam is a cryptographer focused on applied SNARKs and on-chain proof verification for Bitcoin. He co-discovered how to use garbled circuits on Bitcoin and has helped make BitVM protocols practical through schemes such as Glock. His techniques are used in several state-of-the-art proof systems. He is the former chief scientist and founding cryptographer at Alpen Labs, and previously worked at Polygon Zero, Aztec, and Blockstream.
Ying Tong Lai
Ying Tong is a senior cryptography engineer with previous work at Zcash and the Ethereum Foundation. She is one of the primary authors of Halo2 with extensive experience implementing circuits and proof systems. Ying Tong is the primary author of the Argo garbled-circuits implementation, the industry-leading scheme for BitVM3.
