Bitcoin ecosystem welcomes another wave of technological breakthroughs. Stanford University professor and Babylon co-founder David Tse recently announced the official release of the BABE protocol—a set of Groth16 proof verification solutions specifically designed for Bitcoin.

The key highlight is the significant reduction in costs: initialization and storage costs have been cut by three orders of magnitude, meaning a thousandfold decrease. More importantly, the previously complex and cumbersome verification process has been greatly simplified. This solution is expected to go live in February alongside Babylon's trustless Bitcoin vault alpha testnet.

Why is this a major event? It all starts with Groth16's awkward position on Bitcoin. In theory, Groth16, as a zero-knowledge proof tool, could help Bitcoin address privacy and scalability issues. But in reality, the costs are prohibitively high.

Previously, running Groth16 verification on Bitcoin required massive computational resources for initialization, and storage demands were staggering. The cost of a single verification was enough to deter most applications and node operators. As a result, promising privacy solutions became illusory.

Now with BABE, the situation is beginning to change. Zero-knowledge proofs have shifted from an expensive "luxury" to a widely usable tool. This is not just a technological iteration but also signifies an expansion of Bitcoin's application boundaries—from simple value storage to a programmable value network. The door has finally been opened.