The easiest way to code smart contracts — After months of intense development, we are super thrilled to introduce scryptTS: a Typescript framework to write smart contracts on Bitcoin. scryptTS is a Typescript-based domain specific language (DSL) for coding smart contracts on Bitcoin, based on our experience of developing and fostering the sCrypt ecosystem in the past three…

We develop a novel method for a user to pay for cloud storage. Compared to traditional cloud storage such as Amazon’s S3, the user does not have have to trust the server. We use Bitcoin smart contracts to ensure the payment is contingent upon the server‘s Proof of Retrievability (PoR)…

In the second part of our Zero-Knowledge Bounty (ZKB) series, we apply it to solving hash collision puzzles. In such a puzzles, two distinct inputs hash to the same output. Such bounties can be used to: act as a canary in a coal mine and give us a valuable heads-up…

Previously, we have used Zero-Knowledge Bounties (ZKB) to pay for a Sudoku solution on Bitcoin. In this series, we are going to use ZKB to solve a wide range of more practical problems. In Part 1, we apply ZKB to pay for a decryption key. Suppose Alice encrypts her files…

A Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) is a function that takes a significant amount of sequential computation to evaluate, but is fast to verify. We have implemented it on Bitcoin for the first time. VDF as a cryptographic primitive can be used to build a plethora of new applications such as…

How to detect the next FTX and Mt. Gox — The implosion of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, with billions of customer funds missing, is the latest example of exchange insolvency in the history of cryptocurrencies. The history stretches all the way back to 2014 when the oldest and largest exchange Mt. Gox, handing 70% of Bitcoin trades, lost 850,000 Bitcoins…

We are excited to announce the first successful Zero-Knowledge Bounty on the Bitcoin network. We have applied Zero-Knowledge Bounty to solve a 9x9 Sudoku puzzle. Compared to Pay-to-Sudoku using Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payment (ZKCP), a seller does not have to interact with the buyer, who only needs to post a single…

How to securely outsource any computation — We present a novel bounty mechanism that can outsource arbitrary computation securely and privately on a blockchain. The exchange of solution and payment is atomic and trustless: either the bounty maker learns the solution and the collector gets the rewards, or neither happens. The maker deploys a smart contract that…

State update contention Bitcoin smart contracts store states in the outputs of a chain of transactions. State transition occurs when a transaction spends the output containing the old state and creates an output containing the new state. At any given time, a single output/UTXO at the tip of the transaction chain has the…