Stanford professor and Babylon co-founder David Tse has officially announced BABE (BAbylon-BErkeley), a new Groth16-based zero-knowledge proof verification protocol designed for the Bitcoin ecosystem. The protocol promises to reduce initialization and storage costs by over a thousandfold compared to current state-of-the-art solutions.
BABE integrates two cryptographic innovations: Witness Encryption on Linear Pairing, which simplifies complex verification to a single scalar multiplication, and the Argo MAC obfuscation primitive, which transforms that computation into an efficient homomorphic MAC.
Scheduled to launch with the Babylon Trustless Bitcoin Vault's alpha testnet in February 2026, BABE aims to bring significantly more scalable and affordable ZK-proof verification to Bitcoin, potentially enabling new use cases in scalability, privacy, and interoperability. $BTC $ETH $BNB
