On January 18th, Stanford University professor and Babylon co-founder David Tse announced the official release of BABE (Babylon-BErkeley), a new Groth16 zero-knowledge proof verification protocol for Bitcoin. This solution reduces initialization and storage costs by more than a thousand times compared to the current best-in-class solutions.
BABE combines two key cryptographic innovations:
One is Witness Encryption on Linear Pairing, which simplifies the complex multiple pairing operations in Groth16 verification into a single scalar multiplication on the BN254 elliptic curve.
Secondly, by utilizing the newly proposed Argo MAC confusion primitive, the scalar multiplication is further transformed into a vector homomorphic MAC, thereby achieving efficient computation.
David Tse stated that BABE will launch in February 2026 along with the alpha testnet of Babylon Trustless Bitcoin Vault, with the goal of achieving lower-cost and more scalable zero-knowledge proof verification capabilities within the Bitcoin system.
