BitcoinOS: ZK Proofs for Bitcoin Without the Need for a 'Problematic' Network Fork

Bitcoin DeFi expansion faces fork dilemma as developers explore ZK proof capabilities

BitcoinOS contributor and crypto expert Edan Yago describes Bitcoin forks as “open heart surgery.”

Jamie Crowley | Edited by Sheldon Rebeck on 2025-03-20 15:54 UTC

What you need to know:

• Developers looking to integrate DeFi into Bitcoin are considering implementing zero-knowledge proofs into the blockchain.
• This could require a soft fork, an action that Edan Yago, a Bitcoin veteran with more than a decade of experience, calls “problematic.”
• BitcoinOS has open-sourced what Yago describes as a “fully production-ready” BitSNARK protocol, providing access to ZK verification via a rollup.

Bitcoin developers looking to expand the blockchain's decentralized finance (DeFi) functionality will likely consider implementing zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, a feature that is currently missing and would require a so-called soft fork, or new version of the software, to implement.

This is challenging, according to Edan Yago, a Bitcoin veteran with over a decade of experience and the lead developer of the BitcoinOS (BOS) smart contract operating system.

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“Forking a blockchain, especially one worth $2 trillion, is like open-heart surgery,” Yago told CoinDesk. “There’s no doubt that hard forks are more problematic, but I think any fork is risky.”

A fork is a modification of the blockchain code that requires a deviation at a certain point to move onto a separate path. Forks can be “soft,” where older versions can still interact with the new one, or “hard,” which makes older versions incompatible and requires all users to update the software.

ZK proofs are a cryptographic method that allows statements to be proven to be true while maintaining privacy, without revealing any information about them. This feature is not present in the Bitcoin software, but it can be implemented using proposed implementations such as OP_CAT and OP_CTV. Yago noted that developers should find ways to implement them in Bitcoin without any fork.

“The onus is on the developers to prove that there is no other way to achieve this through smart engineering,” he added.

This is what BOS aims to achieve with BitSNARK, a Bitcoin rollup protocol that is part of a family of computing paradigms being developed to scale the original blockchain. These concepts emerged after Robin Linus’s introduction of BitVM in October 2023, which described how smart contracts similar to Ethereum could be integrated into Bitcoin.

BitcoinOS has now open-sourced what Yago describes as a “fully production-ready” BitSNARK protocol, giving developers access to ZK verification on Bitcoin and the ability to connect it to other blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, and Cardano.

BitSNARKs allow developers to process large, complex programs and prove the results of computations in as little as 300 bytes, which can be verified in standard Bitcoin transactions. This could pave the way for BTCFi, a term related to

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