How To Make Bitcoin Transactions 10x Faster

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What do you think of when you hear the words: “BitSNARK & Grail”?

a) A new Netflix special by a famous comedy duo

b) A ragtag team of spies who use code names to maintain anonymity

c) A solution for solving a big part of the Holy Grail of blockchain technology – the trilemma – boosting transaction speeds on the Bitcoin network by 10x.

If you answered a or b, we wouldn’t blame you. But fortunately, Seb and Chevy aren’t planning to become comedians (or anonymous spies).

This week, a new whitepaper was released called BitSNARK & Grail which includes a detailed proposal about how to solve for the Bitcoin trilemma.

The trilemma states that in order for a blockchain to function, trade-offs must be made to at least one of the following: decentralization, security or scalability.

Bitcoin has always been highly decentralized due to the way new BTC is mined, and the fact that it didn’t start with one group of people owning a huge portion of the crypto.

Bitcoin is insanely secure. To date, it’s never been hacked. *knock on wood*

The trade-off has been in scalability.

Compare it to Solana for example: BTC can handle about 7 transactions per second. Solana can handle about 65,000 transactions per second.

So, the big brains behind BitSNARK & Grail have come up with a solution – use rollups, on the BTC network.

Rollups bundle a bunch of transactions off-chain, validate them, then bring them back on-chain (so the original blockchain only has to process a single transaction).

We love to see innovation happen in all corners of web3.

But innovation focused on the Bitcoin blockchain makes us extra excited.

Love to see it 🙂