Babylon Co-founder David Tse has released a new cryptographic protocol for Bitcoin called BABE. What are the highlights of this solution? Simply put, it significantly reduces the cost of Groth16 proof verification—initialization and storage costs are three orders of magnitude lower than existing solutions.

Technically, it employs two key ideas: first, witness encryption on linear pairings; second, the Argo MAC scheme. Combining these two technologies simplifies the originally complex Groth16 verification process to be performed on the BN254 curve. In other words, it accomplishes the same cryptographic verification work in a more lightweight manner. This is indeed a major breakthrough for the scalability and interaction efficiency of the Bitcoin ecosystem.