Babylon Launches BABE Protocol: Zero-Knowledge Proof Verification Cost Drops by a Thousand Times, to Land in the Bitcoin Ecosystem by 2026

【Crypto World】Stanford Professor and Babylon Co-founder David Tse’s team recently announced a major breakthrough—launching the BABE (BAbylon-BErkeley) protocol, a new Groth16 zero-knowledge proof verification scheme designed specifically for Bitcoin.

How hardcore is this scheme? Its initialization and storage costs are directly reduced by over a thousand times compared to the current optimal solutions. How is this achieved? It relies on two key innovations at the core: First, by using witness encryption technology based on linear pairings, it transforms the complex multiple pairing operations in Groth16 verification into a single scalar multiplication on the BN254 elliptic curve—this inherently simplifies the computation process. Second, it introduces a new Argo MAC obfuscation primitive, further transforming scalar multiplication into vector homomorphic MACs, achieving additional efficiency improvements.

According to the schedule, BABE will be launched alongside the alpha testnet of Babylon Trustless Bitcoin Vault in February 2026. David Tse stated that this scheme aims to inject low-cost, highly scalable zero-knowledge proof verification capabilities into the Bitcoin system, which is a pretty interesting boost for the application layer expansion of the entire BTC ecosystem.