Conference Kickoff

Let’s get this party scaling.

zkCoins: Make Bitcoin Cypherpunk again

Strong privacy and efficient scalability by combining client-side validation with zero-knowledge proofs

Bitcoin for International Trade

Adoption in the global production and supply chains is the next big frontier for Bitcoin. The fiat currency system has a US$2.5 trillion trade finance gap which prevents business growth and prosperity in entire countries. Bitcoin arguably could come to the rescue. For this, we must openly confront and build solutions for a number of neglected issues: volatility, layered scaling of both technical and monetary capacity, and the role of credit in Bitcoin. I will report the findings of a fresh market research project in Turkey which showed great interest amongst Turkish businesses. Interestingly, of all countries worldwide, Turkey may be the best place to start business adoption of Bitcoin. What are the chances and challenges to orange-pill businesses in the real economy?

Unveiling the Magic of Zero-Knowledge Proofs: From Waldo to Bitcoin's Future

This talk offers a brief introduction to the fascinating world of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), exploring their fundamental concepts and real-world implications. We'll use an interactive demo to grasp the core idea: proving something is true without revealing anything about the underlying secret, as we delve into how these cryptographic marvels leverage randomness to achieve verifiable certainty – a compelling contrast to traditional deterministic proofs. Participant will discover how the surprising the link between ZKPs and NP-Complete problems offers a broad range of applications.

Building Advanced Bitcoin Protocols with BitVMX

This talk examines the building blocks that BitVMX provides for constructing complex disputable computing systems on Bitcoin. We will analyze the architectural design of these components, and discuss advanced solutions that emerge from their composition. The presentation will also reflect on lessons learned during the development of applications that use these techniques.

The Script Army Knife

What does it take to make Bitcoin programmable money? Do we need to abandon Script, or can we make Script great instead? Developers don't want opcodes, they want capabilities. And different sets of opcodes enable different capabilities. But not all ways of enabling these capabilities are equally good. What does it mean to enable something badly? Can we avoid that? An opinionated journey into Bitcoin Script, the new primitives and the opcodes that enable them.

Enabling stateless offline Bitcoin clients with STARKs

We will explore how to "compress" SPV proofs to make them self-sufficient, so that clients do not need to store Bitcoin block headers or maintain a connection to an RPC node in order to verify transaction inclusion.

BRC2.0 and Programmable Bitcoin Native Assets

We will briefly explore what Bitcoin meta-protocols are and how they work then go deeper into how BRC2.0 works and explore programmable bitcoin native assets.

Rootstock

Description to come

ZK and STARKs on Bitcoin: Consensus Hurdles and Layer 2 Possibilities

Zero-Knowledge proofs are no longer theory: they’re tools that can push Bitcoin further without compromising its core principles. In this talk, we’ll break down the essentials of ZK and dive deep into STARKs: transparent, trust-minimized, and resilient even in a post-quantum future. We’ll explore how they could strengthen Bitcoin, from more efficient, privacy-preserving SPV proofs to potential consensus improvements, and examine zk-rollups through a Bitcoin lens, as a way to scale while keeping decentralization intact. Finally, we’ll outline how STARKs might integrate into Bitcoin’s Layer 2 landscape, from enhancing Lightning to complementing emerging designs like Ark, expanding what’s possible without weakening Bitcoin’s foundation.

SUBFROST as a Bitcoin L0

Discussion on decentralized multisigs on taproot and the approach we use at SUBFROST (wasmtime/libp2p-quic/frost-secpk2561-tr)

Combining Bitcoin and Ethereum to build the gateway to Bitcoin DeFi

Imagine unlocking Bitcoin's full potential in DeFi by combining the best of both worlds. Bitcoin's security and capital, with Ethereum's innovation and apps. Use native BTC on BOB Hybrid Chain, powered by BitVM and secured by Bitcoin, and feel confident BOB is the safest place to put your BTC to work in DeFi.

Citrea Workshop

Description to come

Frontier of Bitcoin: Babylon Labs

Description to come

The Future of Bitcoin Payments with Ark

Scaling with Arks. Challenges and complexities around building off-chain scaling.

Ark: Scaling Bitcoin with new protocols

To be determined

ZK: Zero Knowledge Bitcoin

To be determined

Hackathon Kickoff

Who’s the fastest scaling hacker in Istanbul? We’ll take the top 5 teams from the Expo and give them the opportunity to impress the judges live.

Hackathon Team Building

Optional!! Come find a team to work with. We’ll help everyone find someone else to work with, and then you can start making plans for what you’ll build over lunch.

Hackathon Ideas Workshop

Optional!! Need a good idea to hack on? Come ideate with the btc++ staff and hackathon veterans.

Hacking Time

You don’t have much time, what are you building?

Hackathon Expo

Showcase your work in this round-robin style of judging

Verifying Proofs on Bitcoin Today with Garbled Circuits

We can enable verification of off chain computation on bitcoin using cryptography without soft forks. This talk will describe how, what the trade offs are, and what the future might hold.

Faster and Cheaper Atomic Swaps

I will present Papa Swaps which are an invention i made to reduce the cost and duration of submarine swaps by 50%

Bitcoin’s Quantum Question

description to come…

Exploring What’s Possible with Garbled Circuits

Garbled circuits have recently gained attention for their potential to enhance disputable computing on Bitcoin. In this talk, we will present two new protocols that leverage features of garbled circuits to improve efficiency and expand the range of systems that can be expressed, opening the door to new use cases.

FR25ZKv

A talk and announcement

Derivation of strong Bitcoin keys from lower-than-standard entropy secrets

Seed phrases were introduced in Bitcoin wallets in 2013 as a human-readable representation of cryptographic secrets, intended to be memorized rather than stored. However, most users struggle to reliably memorize even a short list of random words, creating usability and security trade-offs. This talk explores alternative approaches to Bitcoin key recovery based on entropy extraction from human-memorable data sources. The talk includes: - extracting the secret data from biometrics and real-world objects - combining it with the password and PoW to receive a reliable Bitcoin key with enough security bits - constructing the Bitcoin address in the way it can be recovered if the primary key is lost Finally, the talk will present an economic analysis of the system parameters including PoW difficulty, secret length, locktime, and attack costs needed to achieve the optimal solution from both security and time perspectives.

Scaling User Experiences

One common complaint for Lightning, the OG layer-2 scaling solution for Bitcoin, is how complicated and difficult the onboarding experience is for new users. How do new protocols and ways of scaling improve the user experience, while maintaining guarantees for self-custody?

Bitcoin Bridges with Garbled Circuits

Garbled circuits are surprisingly straightforward, yet powerful cryptographic constructs that enable secure computation between parties. Notably, they allow us to prove arbitrary computations on Bitcoin optimistically, significantly cheaper than earlier methods like BitVM.

From Theory to Practice: Making Cryptography Play Nicely with Bitcoin

Interesting new scaling solutions like BitVM and garbled circuits use existing and novel cryptographic constructions for bitcoin scaling. But while bitcoin offers expressivity through script, it is limited; this means we need to get clever to help new solutions play nicely with existing protocol rules. In this talk, we'll give examples of techniques we can use to carefully and thoughtfully integrate scaling solutions given bitcoin's unique limitations.

MergeSync: towards link bound Initial Block Download

New technique for building the utxo set. Speed-up over 2x+ confirmed experimentally. Tech walktrough + Demo

Alpen Labs: The Frontier of ZK

Description to come

Simple SNARKs for Local Proving

Modern ZK SNARK design has become increasingly modular, flexible, and complex, in order to squeeze out server-side performance for scaling applications. This complexity poses security risks, and yet is still insufficient for generating proofs locally on consumer hardware. Jim from Irreducible, the team leading R&D of Binius, presents new work on simpler SNARKS optimized for local proving, and the benefits of binary field-based constructions.

How using bills of exchange in conjunction with ecash will help increase the velocity of 1 sat by several dozen times

In this workshop, we will go through the entire process from drawing a Bitcoin denominated bill of exchange between two companies, to using the ecash generated from this bill of exchange to pay for the daily needs of the employees of these companies. This session will show the full money cycle for the new Bitcoin economy, which will allow Bitcoin to scale up to use as a medium of exchange.

Bitcoin x STARKs: a math match made in Heaven

Explore how Zero Knowledge Proofs and STARKs in particular can be useful for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin PIPEs

Bitcoin PIPEs present a way to introduce covenants and ZKP verification to the Bitcoin L1 without a softfork. We want to give an update on the status of the research and improvements made to the PIPEs v1 published in October 2024.

how to build an app on char

lets build an application on the char network!

Hackathon Finals

Who’s the fastest scaling hacker in Istanbul? We’ll take the top 5 teams from the Expo and give them the opportunity to impress the judges live.

BitVM: Bridging Bitcoin

To be determined

Closing Ceremony