Babylon Labs, developer of the largest BTC staking protocol, is building a trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge with the Cosmos network to enhance the world’s oldest blockchain’s interoperability.

In partnership with Bitcoin developers Fiamma, Babylon is using the BitVM2 computing paradigm, which is designed to allow Ethereum-style smart contracts on Bitcoin, which then paves the way for zero-knowledge technology.

Zero-knowledge computations allow different parties to verify that information is accurate without actually revealing to each other what the information is. In this sense, it is foundational to bridging digital assets between different blockchains.

Developers like Babylon Labs and Fiamma are aiming to unlock the deep wells of value stored in BTC to finance other ecosystems and allow it to be transacted on blockchains that are free of some of Bitcoin’s limitations of speed and scale.

This forms part of a broader movement to extract greater utility from Bitcoin, similar to that which is commonplace on networks like Ethereum. Babylon’s Bitcoin staking protocol, which is one of the foremost projects in this sector, is billed as a way of using BTC to secure other protocols and decentralized applications and has a total value locked (TVL) of around $5.5 billion.

The introduction of BitVM2’s predecessor by Robin Linus in October 2023 was hailed as a breakthrough for making Bitcoin more programmable, through enabling a rollup that can handle faster and cheaper transactions without compromising security. This could then allow bridges to securely transfer BTC to the rollup, and later bring the BTC back so that deposits can be withdrawn.

BitVM inspired plenty of fervor among developers building projects on Bitcoin, including some focused on bridging to other networks. Zero-knowledge rollup Citrea, which is backed by Galaxy Digital, deployed a BitVM-based bridge to the Bitcoin testnet last September. It is designed to be compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the smart-contracts-executing software that powers the Ethereum protocol.