Chainway and Kasar Labs race to bring ZK Rollups to Bitcoin

Bitcoin-focused infrastructure teams Chainway and Kasar Labs have each released data availability (DA) adapters that allow zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups to anchor to Bitcoin, marking one of the first concrete steps toward ZK rollup ecosystems on the network. Chainway open-sourced a DA adapter for the Sovereign SDK, enabling developers to build Sovereign-based ZK rollups that use Bitcoin as their data availability and settlement layer, with the goal of powering what it calls Bitcoin’s first ZK rollup. In parallel, Kasar Labs, in collaboration with Taproot Wizards, shipped a separate DA adapter that connects the Madara/Starknet stack to Bitcoin, allowing Starknet-style rollups written in Cairo to post their data and proofs to Bitcoin. These initiatives use Bitcoin inscriptions via the Ordinals Protocol rather than requiring a Bitcoin soft fork, sidestepping the need for a new opcode that would let Bitcoin nodes natively verify ZK proofs on-chain. While a future consensus change could in principle allow fully trustless ZK rollups where users verify proofs with only a Bitcoin node, the current designs rely on Bitcoin primarily as a robust data and finality layer, inheriting its security while handling computation and state transitions off-chain. If these approaches mature, they could expand Bitcoin’s scalability and privacy by enabling high-throughput, ZK-verified environments for applications such as DeFi, smart contracts, and private transactions, all ultimately anchored to Bitcoin’s base layer.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

More coverage

• What are ZK Rollups (Validity Rollups)? - Ledger (ledger.com)
• ZK Rollups for the Crypto Blockchain Reduces Gas Fees (zkrollups.io)
• Chainway Labs (chainway.xyz)

Explore the topic

• ZK
• Bitcoin