ZeroSync project leader Robin Linus announced in a white paper titled “BitVM: Computing Anything on Bitcoin” on October 9 that BitVM can implement Turing-complete Bitcoin contracts without changing the Bitcoin consensus rules.
With BitVM, the “logic” of Bitcoin contracts will be executed off-chain, but verification will occur on Bitcoin, similar to Ethereum’s optimistic rollup.
BitVM’s architecture is based on a fraud proof and challenge response model, where “provers” can make claims and verifiers can perform fraud proofs to punish the prover when false claims are made.
Linus explained that Bitcoin in its current form is limited to basic operations such as signatures, time locks, and hash locks, but can now be extended through BitVM, which can compute many interesting applications.