GOAT Network, a Bitcoin native zkRollup project, today announced the official launch of the GOAT BitVM2 testnet V3. This testnet uses Bitcoin as the final decision-making layer and aims to allow BTC to participate in real financial activities without relying on custodians, committees, or multisignature trust assumptions.
For a long time, Bitcoin has been viewed as a "store of value" rather than a widely usable financial asset. Despite having a multi-trillion dollar holder base, when it comes to cross-chain transactions, yields, trading, or other financial activities, users often have to relinquish control to third-party institutions or rely on implicit assumptions such as majority honesty.
GOAT Network aims to resolve this core contradiction:
When a system malfunctions, does Bitcoin itself have the ability to verify complex off-chain calculations ?
The key challenge for BTCFi: Can Bitcoin become the ultimate arbiter?
Most current Bitcoin L2 or BTCFi solutions still rely on one of the following structures:
Escrow or multi-signature bridge: Asset control is concentrated in the hands of a group of signatories.
The committee or majority's honesty assumption: System security depends on participants remaining online and honest.
Off-chain settlement: The final dispute was resolved on a blockchain outside of Bitcoin.
These solutions can work when the system is running normally, but in extreme cases such as attacks, outages, or governance conflicts, Bitcoin itself cannot unilaterally enforce an exit or ruling .
"The Bitcoin Layer 2 market hasn't really started yet. So far, the so-called 'Bitcoin L2' is essentially still a sidechain or custodian bridge. They lack permissionless exit mechanisms and dispute resolution capabilities enforced by the Bitcoin mainnet, which are prerequisites for BTCFi to gain long-term trust."
Kevin Liu, a core contributor to GOAT Network
BitVM2: Enabling Bitcoin to Participate in Ruling Without Upgrading the Protocol
Because of Bitcoin's extremely simple underlying design and lack of a general smart contract execution environment, "native Bitcoin Rollup" has long been considered difficult to achieve.
BitVM2's breakthrough lies in providing a path to enforce correctness in Bitcoin. It utilizes only Bitcoin's existing primitives, including pre-signed transactions, one-time signatures, and taproot, to build a challengeable enforcement mechanism. This allows for challenges to malicious or forged proofs , ultimately forcing a result enforced by Bitcoin's consensus rules.
Building on this foundation, GOAT Network has taken BitVM2 from theory to system-level implementation, expanding it into a complete and verifiable native Bitcoin zkRollup architecture .
Testnet V3 is a public testing environment for GOAT Network's native Bitcoin zkRollup technology stack, and it has the following core features:
Layer 2 execution is completed off-chain, and its correctness is guaranteed by zero-knowledge validity proof based on zkVM.
The second-level sorting result is anchored to Bitcoin.
Withdrawals and disputes are ultimately adjudicated by the Bitcoin mainnet rules.
Anyone can participate in the challenge or verification, rather than relying on a single operator.
This means:
When the system is running smoothly, the user experience is close to that of a high-performance L2 system; when the system encounters problems, Bitcoin still retains the final say.
What did GOAT do to make BitVM2 truly "run"?
Building upon the theoretical design of BitVM2, GOAT Network has added several key capabilities for real-world deployment scenarios:
1. Bitcoin's peg order and historical consistency
Simply proving that "a certain state is valid" is not enough. GOAT anchors the sorting results to Bitcoin and binds withdrawals to that history, preventing operators from submitting alternative forks at exit boundaries.
2. A withdrawal mechanism that works like real currency.
The system supports withdrawals of any amount, which are completed through atomic paths and block header chain verification, without relying on complex user-side operation processes.
3. Economically Feasible Controversial Path (BitVM2-GC)
Challenge mechanisms become ineffective in reality if they are too costly. GOAT introduces a scheme based on Garbled Circuits and Designated Validator SNARKs (DV-SNARKs) , which reduces the amount of fraud-proof data that needs to be uploaded to the blockchain in the worst case by about 1,000 times , making the challenge feasible within realistic cost ranges.
4. Security Model Based on the 1-of-n Honesty Assumption
By rotating roles and managing on-chain staking, the system can be prevented from degenerating into an implicit trust in a small number of online participants over the long term.
In addition to the BitVM2 core mechanism, GOAT Network has also built a complete system-level capability, which is a complete native Bitcoin zkRollup technical solution, including:
Type-1 zkEVM Execution Environment : Fully equivalent to Ethereum, reducing development and migration costs.
Decentralized Sequencer Architecture : Reducing Single Point of Trust and Censorship Risks at the Architectural Level
Our self-developed zkVM (Ziren) proof engine : Audited and used to generate proofs of execution validity.
Why is this testnet so significant?
The GOAT BitVM2 testnet is not a typical product launch, but rather a public validation phase of system-level security assumptions :
For users: First-time experience with a BTC usage and withdrawal path guaranteed by Bitcoin rules.
For developers: Deploying a complete EVM application on the native Bitcoin zkRollup, running an Operator or Challenger node, and participating in the BitVM Optimistic Challenge process.
For the industry: Publicly answering the core question of "Can Bitcoin truly support a trustworthy financial system?"
The GOAT BitVM2 Testnet is now live and open to the public for testing. This is the last phase before the GOAT Network mainnet launches, allowing all key assumptions to be tested in real-world scenarios.
About GOAT Network
GOAT Network is building a native Bitcoin zkRollup architecture with the goal of enabling BTC to flow, generate revenue, and participate in real economic activities without sacrificing Bitcoin's security model.
V3 testnet: https://bitvm2-testnet4.goat.network/bridge-in
GOAT BitVM2 Whitepaper: https://www.goat.network/bitvm2-whitepaper
Official website: goat.network
