Babylon co-founder launches the BABE protocol, reducing Bitcoin Groth16 proof verification costs by over 1000 times

DeepFlowTech · 2026-01-18T05:40:14+00:00

Stanford University professor David Tse officially announced the release of the BABE protocol, aimed at improving Bitcoin's Groth16 proof verification and increasing setup and storage cost efficiency by approximately 1000 times. The scheme combines witness encryption and Argo MAC. BABE will go live on Babylon alpha-testnet in February and welcomes community feedback.

DeepFlowTech

2026-01-18 05:40:14

Abstract generation in progress

Deep Tide TechFlow News, Stanford University professor and Babylon co-founder David Tse announced that the team has officially released BABE (BAbylon-BErkeley), a Groth16 proof verification protocol designed for Bitcoin. The team states that this solution achieves approximately three orders of magnitude (1000x) improvement in setup and storage costs compared to existing optimal solutions, aiming to make “verifying zkSNARK proofs on Bitcoin” more feasible and practically applicable.

According to the introduction, BABE combines two key ideas: witness encryption on linear pairings and the newly proposed Argo MAC (a garbling primitive). Witness encryption can compress the complex pairing operations in Groth16 verification into a single scalar multiplication on the BN254 elliptic curve; this scalar multiplication can then be further transformed into a vector homomorphic MAC, which is efficiently computed by Argo MAC.

The team states that BABE will be part of the Babylon Trustless Bitcoin Vault, launching in the Babylon alpha-testnet in February, and invites the community to read the paper and provide feedback.

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