Glossary
BitVM
A research framework for expressing arbitrary computation on Bitcoin via large precommitted contract trees and fraud-proof challenge games — no fork required.
BitVM, proposed by Robin Linus in 2023, encodes off-chain computation as a series of pre-signed Bitcoin transactions representing a fraud-proof game. The two parties commit to a computation tree off-chain, and any cheating party can be challenged and slashed via on-chain transactions — without changing the Bitcoin protocol.
The framework is still in active research and engineering. It matters because it sketches a path to optimistic and ZK rollups on Bitcoin without requiring a soft fork to add new opcodes.