Babylon co-founder David Tse releases BABE protocol: Bitcoin Groth16 verification cost reduced by over 1,000 times

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 zero-knowledge proof verification protocol for Bitcoin. This scheme reduces initialization and storage costs by over a thousand times compared to the current optimal solutions.

BABE combines two key cryptographic innovations:

One is Witness Encryption on Linear Pairing, based on linear pairings, which simplifies the complex multiple pairing operations in Groth16 verification into a single scalar multiplication on the BN254 elliptic curve;

The second uses 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 go live in February 2026 alongside the alpha testnet of Babylon Trustless Bitcoin Vault, aiming to achieve lower-cost and more scalable zero-knowledge proof verification within the Bitcoin ecosystem.