Cartesi on Bitcoin

Technical Vision Forum Technical Evolution Plan
1

There is a growing movement in Bitcoin surrounding BitVM: https://bitvm.org/bitvm.pdf - which enables off-chain computation and bigger expressability of Bitcoin Script, their VM.

As part of an earlier hackathon project, some of us got a Cartesi RV64I circuit working as a binary circuit.

BitVM has now moved on to be more like a small on-chain VM with basic opcodes ( rv32i-to-bitvm/bitvm.ts at main · zippiehq/rv32i-to-bitvm · GitHub ) that is very RISC-V like, which uses bisection and merkleization of state using blake3 as hash function.

As part of a Xmas project, we additionally developed GitHub - zippiehq/rv32i-to-bitvm that converts/transpiles RV32I ELF binaries to BitVM programs.

It is not impossible that we could get the Cartesi RV64GC emulator building to RV32I like we did for Cartesi on RiscZero/ZK and “page in” pages within a 4GB memory space.

And have the Cartesi Machine as primary entry point for many new innovations on Bitcoin - which could be a very interesting positioning for Cartesi.

A possibility could also be RFPs around Cartesi+BitVM.

1 Like
2

Any insight on if the general bitcoin community is excited for having execution capabilities on top of it’s blockchain? It’s been a while since I’ve followed that community closely, but I had the impression they were very focused on being a store of value network and was very slow in innovating (on purpose).

Having said that, I do like the idea of making the Cartesi Machine a popular execution environment for protocol stacks without their own powerful VM, such as Celestia or Bitcoin. And if the bitvm movement is getting traction, might be a good opportunity to make some new connections and attract some devs to help make our vision happen.

3

Yeah, BitVM has 1000+ people in their telegram and many of the different development groups participate. This isn’t a fork or hardfork or softfork of Bitcoin so it’s permissionless innovation