Crypto Insights
2025 MIT Bitcoin Expo: Spotlight on Freedom Tech
The 12th MIT Bitcoin Expo took place on April 5–6, centering this year’s theme on “Freedom Tech” and how technology can facilitate physical and social liberation.
Day 1 Recap: Mawarire delivered the keynote speech “Why Freedom Tech Matters,” and Dryja discussed how Bitcoin demonstrates resilience against nation-states. The morning sessions focused on corporate adoption, featuring speakers such as Paul Giordano from Marathon Digital and Bitcoin Core contributors like Gloria Zhao. The afternoon shifted toward more technical topics, including consensus cleanup, poisoning attacks, censorship resistance, and the Bitcoin Pipes protocol.
Day 2 Recap: The focus shifted to global impact. Mauricio Bartolomeo discussed the exfiltration of resources via Bitcoin, followed by a panel with activists from Venezuela, Russia, and Togo. Technical topics included: scaling self-custody, Steven Roose’s covenant soft fork proposals, the future of freedom tech, quantum resistance, and Tor.
Links of agenda and replay.
Into Bitcoin Address Poisoning Attacks
In this article, Jameson Lopp highlights the rise of Bitcoin address poisoning attacks—an emerging form of social engineering. Attackers send transactions from newly generated wallets that mimic the beginning and end characters of a target's recently used address. If the target later copies an address from their transaction history, they may unknowingly send funds to the attacker instead of the intended recipient. Though the success rate per attack is low, the low cost of transactions enables attackers to attempt thousands in a short period.
Lopp also argues that such attacks are a byproduct of low transaction fees and that higher fees could deter them. He also suggests wallet-level defenses, such as warnings like, “Oh, this came from a similar looking address,” to help users avoid interaction.
Examining the Mitigation Strategy Against Timewarp Attacks
Timewarp attacks, first identified around 2011, allow a majority of malicious miners to manipulate block timestamps, artificially lower difficulty, and mine blocks every few seconds. The “Great Consensus Cleanup” soft fork proposal can mitigate this by requiring that the first block in a new difficulty period must have a time no earlier than a certain number of minutes before the last block of the previous period.
A report examines the details of this BIP.
Tokenization on Bitcoin: Building a Global Settlement Layer with Taproot Assets and Lightning
Bitcoin’s evolution into a multi-asset platform is accelerating with the advent of Taproot Assets and Lightning Network. The integration of these technologies combines Bitcoin’s decentralization and security with the speed and scalability of the Lightning Network. This report examines how Taproot Assets enable asset issuance, transfers, and swaps on Bitcoin’s base layer, and how the Lightning Network facilitates fast, low-cost transfers of those assets. We compare this approach to earlier attempts at Bitcoin asset issuance and analyze its market potential against other blockchains and traditional payment networks.
Solving Data Availability in Client-Side Validation With UTxO Binding
Issuing tokens on Bitcoin is attractive due to its security and dominance, but its limited functionality creates challenges. Client-side validation (CSV) is a common workaround, using off-chain data with on-chain verification, though it risks data loss and withholding. This paper introduces UTxO binding, a framework that links a Bitcoin UTxO to one on an auxiliary chain, providing data storage and programmability. The authors prove its security and implement it using Nervos CKB.
From State Differences to Scaling: Citrea’s Fee Mechanism for Bitcoin
The Citrea team has designed a new fee mechanism to enhance Bitcoin’s scalability without compromising security. It only records essential state differences (i.e., state slot changes) on the Bitcoin main chain, using zero-knowledge proofs to ensure verifiability and Bitcoin security while drastically reducing state inscription costs. Optimizations include: replacing code field with code_hash, compressing state data using a highly efficient compression algorithm Brotli, and analyzing historical Ethereum block data to estimate each transaction’s impact on cumulative state differences—enabling a discount to each transaction.
Second: A New Ark Implementation Launched on Bitcoin Signet
Second, a protocol based on Ark to improve Bitcoin transaction throughput, has launched Bark, a test implementation on Bitcoin Signet.
Ark makes Bitcoin transactions faster, cheaper, and more private, allowing more users and transactions per block. However, funds stored non-custodially via Ark can expire if unused, making it slightly less trustless than mainchain transactions.
BitLayer Optimizes BitVM Bridge Protocol and Demonstrates on Testnet
Bitlayer BitVM Bridge protocol is an optimized adaptation of the bridge protocol outlined in the BitVM2 paper, to improve efficiency, scalability, and security—especially for high-risk cross-chain transactions.
In this article, two key testnet demos on bitvmnet (a BitVM-dedicated testnet) demonstrate how the protocol can:
Cardano Enables Bitcoin DeFi via BitVMX and Lightning Hydra
Cardano is integrating with Bitcoin through Lightning Hydra and BitVMX to enable secure and scalable Bitcoin DeFi.
Zcash’s Tachyon Upgrade: Toward Scalable Oblivious Synchronization
Zcash has unveiled project Tachyon, a proposal to scale Zcash by changing how wallets sync and prove ownership of notes. Instead of scanning the entire blockchain, wallets track only their own nullifiers and receive succinct proofs from untrusted, oblivious sync servers. Transactions include proofs of wallet state (using recursive SNARKs), allowing nodes to verify them without keeping the full history. Notes are exchanged out-of-band, reducing on-chain data and improving privacy. In the nominal case, users get fast sync, lightweight wallets, and strong privacy, without the need to trust the network.
Podcast | Why the Future of Bitcoin Mining is Distributed
In this podcast, Professor Troy Cross discusses the centralization of Bitcoin mining and argues convincingly for hashrate decentralization. While economies of scale have led to mega mining operations, he sees economic imperative that will drive mining toward a globally distributed future—not dominated by the U.S.—ensuring neutrality and resilience against state-level threats.
Binance Report｜Crypto Industry Map March 2025
This report provides an overview of projects using a framework that divides crypto into four core ecosystems—Infrastructure, DeFi, NFT, and Gaming—and four trending sectors: Stablecoins, RWA, AI, and DeSci.
For infrastructure, five key pillars are identified: scalability & fairness, data availability & tooling, security & privacy, cloud networks, and connectivity. The report also maps out and categorizes the major projects and solutions currently on the market.
Top Reads on Blockchain and Beyond
A Game-Theoretic Approach to Bitcoin’s Valuation in Equilibrium
The author presents a game-theoretic argument for why Bitcoin will emerge as the optimal unit of account in equilibrium. The argument is based upon the observation that a generally agreed upon unit of account that represents a constant share of total wealth (equal to the totality of all other economic utility) will naturally create price signals that passively stabilize the macroeconomy, without requiring external intervention.
Bitcoin’s unique properties—finite supply, inertness, fungibility, accessibility, and ownership history—position it as the leading candidate to emerge as this unit.
Neo: Lattice-Based Folding Scheme for CCS Over Small Fields and Pay-Per-Bit Commitments
This paper introduces Neo, a new lattice-based folding scheme for CCS, an NP-complete relation that generalizes R1CS, Plonkish, and AIR. Neo's folding scheme can be viewed as adapting the folding scheme in HyperNova (CRYPTO'24), which assumes elliptic-curve based linearly homomorphic commitments, to the lattice setting. Unlike HyperNova, Neo can use “small” prime fields (e.g., over the Goldilocks prime). Additionally, Neo provides plausible post-quantum security.
Social Scalability: Key to Massive Value Accumulation in Crypto
Social scalability, a concept first proposed by Nick Szabo in his 2017 article Money, Blockchains, and Social Scalability, is further explored in this thread. Here, “social scalability” refers to an institution's ability to allow the maximum number of people to have skin in the game and win. It’s seen as the main reason crypto has become a $2.9T asset class today and a key driver of value accumulation in the coming decade.
The author argues that two critical ingredients for long-term social scalability are credible neutrality and utility. Currently, only BTC and ETH have this potential, yet neither strikes a perfect balance between the two. The author notes that there is not yet a strong narrative around social scalability, and concludes by emphasizing the importance of focusing on long-term value and resisting the temptation of short-term market narratives.
