Babylon co-founder David Tse unveils BABE Protocol: Bitcoin Groth16 Verification Cost Reduced Over a Thousandfold

BlockBeats News, January 18, Stanford University professor and Babylon co-founder David Tse announced that the team has officially released BABE (BAbylon-BErkeley), a new Groth16 zero-knowledge proof verification protocol designed for Bitcoin. This scheme reduces the initialization and storage costs by over a thousand times compared to the current best solution.

BABE combines two key cryptographic innovations:

First is Witness Encryption on Linear Pairing, which simplifies the complex multi-pairing operations in Groth16 verification to a single scalar multiplication on the BN254 elliptic curve;

Second is the use of the recently proposed Argo MAC obfuscation primitive to further transform this scalar multiplication into a vector-homomorphic MAC, enabling efficient computation.

David Tse stated that BABE will launch in February 2026 alongside the alpha testnet of the Babylon Trustless Bitcoin Vault, aiming to achieve lower-cost, more scalable zero-knowledge proof verification capability within the Bitcoin ecosystem.