Babylon co-founders release BABE protocol: Bitcoin Groth16 verification cost reduced by over a thousand times

Stanford University professor and Babylon co-founder David Tse announced that the team has officially released BABE (BAbylon-BErkeley), a new Groth16 zero-knowledge proof verification protocol for Bitcoin. This solution reduces initialization and storage costs by over a thousand times compared to the current optimal solutions.

BABE combines two key cryptographic innovations:

1. Witness Encryption on Linear Pairing, which simplifies the complex multiple pairing operations in Groth16 verification to a single scalar multiplication on the BN254 elliptic curve;

2. Utilizing the recently proposed Argo MAC obfuscation primitive, which further transforms this scalar multiplication into vector homomorphic MAC, enabling efficient computation.

David Tse stated that BABE will launch in February 2026 alongside the alpha testnet of the Babylon Trustless Bitcoin Vault, aiming to achieve lower-cost and more scalable zero-knowledge proof verification capabilities within the Bitcoin ecosystem.