Bitcoin Research Prize 2025
The Bitcoin Research Prize honors breakthrough results that advance Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. Eligible work spans cryptography, theoretical computer science, network theory, economics, and adjacent fields. An independent committee of leading researchers selects the winners annually.
The Bitcoin Research Prize 2025 was awarded to the BitVM2 team for advancing a long-standing goal in blockchain infrastructure: a trust-minimized bridge between Bitcoin and its second layers or other chains. The project is a collaboration among Robin Linus (ZeroSync Association; Stanford University), Lukas Aumayr (University of Edinburgh; Common Prefix), Zeta Avarikioti (TU Wien; Common Prefix), Matteo Maffei (TU Wien), Andrea Pelosi (University of Pisa; University of Camerino; TU Wien), Orfeas Thyfronitis Litos (Imperial College London; Common Prefix), Christos Stefo (TU Wien), David Tse (Stanford University), and Alexei Zamyatin (BOB).
BitVM2 is the first protocol enabling arbitrary computations on Bitcoin, which the team leverages to design the first secure bridge to Layer-2. This work advances the vision of a trustless connection between Bitcoin and its scaling layers with the first light-client-based Bitcoin bridge. At its core, BitVM2-core introduces a paradigm for arbitrary program execution on Bitcoin, combining Turing-complete expressiveness with the security of Bitcoin consensus. BitVM2-bridge improves prior approaches by reducing the trust assumption from an honest majority (t-of-n) to existential honesty (1-of-n) during setup. Liveness holds with only one rational operator, and any user can act as a challenger, enabling permissionless verification. A production-level implementation of BitVM2 is available, and a full challenge verification has been executed on the Bitcoin mainnet.