Cracking The Bitcoin Bridging Problem | With Alexei Zamayatin

Build on Bitcoin (BOB) co-founder Alexei Zamayatin is older than he looks folks: he’s been researching how to build “trustless” Bitcoin bridge architecture since 2018, long before it felt anything close to a mainstream conversation. When Robin Linus came out with BitVM, he believed he found the answer to this impossible problem, and has since poured his efforts into BitVM2 and BOB – a “hybrid L2” between Bitcoin and Ethereum.In this episode, we discussed:- Alexei’s long history researching Bitcoin bridges - The academic work on distributed systems - How BitVM changed the game for Bitcoin - The hybrid architecture of BOB - How BOB merged interop, Babylon, and BitVM bridgingThis episode is powered by Best In Slot—the leading API for Ordinals and BRC20 data aggregation and indexing. TIMESTAMPS:___1:50 How did BOB come to be? 4:28 How early was the “Bitcoin L2” conversation? 5:45 The problem with merged mining 11:40 Alexei’s growing interest in Bitcoin DeFi 13:17 Never a fan of lightning 15:00 The Blocksize Wars begin 17:00 Academic early research on “distributed systems.” 19:40 Bitcoin’s “dark age” after SegWit 20:30 Alexei’s super early work on “trustless” bridging 22:10 Alexei’s PHD: Trustless bridging is impossible 25:00 Pre BitVM bridging solutions 28:40 Alexei’s work on Polkadot and intro to ZKPs 32:50 Ethereum is hard to verify 34:35 Starting work on BOB 38:50 The Hybrid Consensus: Merged Mining and Ethereum Rollups 42:25 How BitVM derailed Alexei’s plans 47:00 Working with Robin Linus on a ZK bridge 49:35 SNARKs vs STARKs 50:35 The limitation of BitVM, how we’ve improved it 52:30 BitVM: Making challenging proofs permissionless 55:50 The challenge / response game of BitVM 59:55 BitVM2: Splitting programs to fit into Bitcoin blocks 01:03:00 Competition in the BitVM design space 01:05:00 Focusing on BOB, leaving BitVM to Fiamma 01:07:00 BOB is an “interoperable execution environment”01:09:00 Build in isolation; get liquidity fragmentation 01:10:30 Is BOB the most secure Bitcoin L2? 01:13:05 How BitVM makes Babylon staking more secure 01:17:50 “Trust minimization dick measuring” › https://x.com/alexeiZamyatin LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST: › YouTube: / @bitcoinrails › X/Twitter: https://x.com/isabelfoxenduke › Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5uPrBxvD691TpTqjijudkO?si=571634b88d574911 CONNECT WITH ISABEL: › Email: [email protected] › LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isabel-foxen-duke-87272423/ › X/Twitter: https://x.com/isabelfoxenduke Bitcoin #Ordinals #BRC20 #Runes #BitVM #zkp