1000x cheaper—cheaper, exactly which part?
I went through @BabylonLabs_io ’s research notes on BABE. The most misleading headline is probably “verifying the proof on Bitcoin to make it 1000x cheaper.” The body is more precise: previously, BitVM3 reduced on-chain costs, but each obfuscation circuit required about 42 GiB of off-chain storage; BABE preserves on-chain savings while reducing off-chain storage and initialization costs by three orders of magnitude.
That means it doesn’t solve some vague “all costs.” Instead, it shrinks a very heavy off-chain suitcase. It’s like an airline didn’t shorten the entire trip by 1000x—it simply turned the 42 oversized checked boxes into carry-on luggage. Whether provers, verifiers, and ordinary devices can participate is undoubtedly substantive progress.
But conversely, shrinking a bottleneck doesn’t mean the system is reduced to a single button. BABE still needs an obfuscation circuit that combines witness encryption for linear pairings with elliptic-curve scalar multiplication, with the goal of making Groth16 proofs verifiable in practice on Bitcoin. Who initializes, who continuously stores the required materials, whether challengers can respond in time under pressure, and whether the code implementation matches the paper’s parameters—none of that disappears just because “1000x” appears in the headline.
This is also the part I care about most when reading $BABY ’s technical narrative: research breakthroughs should be recognized, but research metrics can’t be directly converted into product throughput, user cost, or mainnet security. How much you save on-chain, how much you save off-chain, and how much faster it is end-to-end must be broken down and calculated.
So the next thing worth looking at for #baby isn’t simply repeating “proving is cheaper.” It’s the publicly available benchmarks: device requirements, initialization time, and—if something fails—who completes the challenge. Cryptography can turn the impossible into something doable; engineering is what determines whether it can become routine.
$BTC $HOME
I went through @BabylonLabs_io ’s research notes on BABE. The most misleading headline is probably “verifying the proof on Bitcoin to make it 1000x cheaper.” The body is more precise: previously, BitVM3 reduced on-chain costs, but each obfuscation circuit required about 42 GiB of off-chain storage; BABE preserves on-chain savings while reducing off-chain storage and initialization costs by three orders of magnitude.
That means it doesn’t solve some vague “all costs.” Instead, it shrinks a very heavy off-chain suitcase. It’s like an airline didn’t shorten the entire trip by 1000x—it simply turned the 42 oversized checked boxes into carry-on luggage. Whether provers, verifiers, and ordinary devices can participate is undoubtedly substantive progress.
But conversely, shrinking a bottleneck doesn’t mean the system is reduced to a single button. BABE still needs an obfuscation circuit that combines witness encryption for linear pairings with elliptic-curve scalar multiplication, with the goal of making Groth16 proofs verifiable in practice on Bitcoin. Who initializes, who continuously stores the required materials, whether challengers can respond in time under pressure, and whether the code implementation matches the paper’s parameters—none of that disappears just because “1000x” appears in the headline.
This is also the part I care about most when reading $BABY ’s technical narrative: research breakthroughs should be recognized, but research metrics can’t be directly converted into product throughput, user cost, or mainnet security. How much you save on-chain, how much you save off-chain, and how much faster it is end-to-end must be broken down and calculated.
So the next thing worth looking at for #baby isn’t simply repeating “proving is cheaper.” It’s the publicly available benchmarks: device requirements, initialization time, and—if something fails—who completes the challenge. Cryptography can turn the impossible into something doable; engineering is what determines whether it can become routine.
$BTC $HOME