PANews reported on March 21 that according to CoinDesk, developers who want to expand the DeFi function of the Bitcoin blockchain may consider zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs), a feature that has not yet been implemented and needs to be introduced through a so-called soft fork or a new version of the software. However, for Edan Yago, a veteran with more than ten years of Bitcoin experience and a core contributor to the smart contract operating system BitcoinOS (BOS), this is a problem.

"Forking a blockchain, especially a $2 trillion blockchain, is like open-heart surgery," Yago said in an interview. "Hard forks are obviously more problematic, but I think introducing any kind of fork is fraught with risk." Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic method that can prove the validity of a statement without revealing any information. Bitcoin software does not currently have this feature, but it could be implemented through proposed implementations such as OP_CAT and OP_CTV. Yago said that developers should be able to find ways to enable zero-knowledge proofs on Bitcoin without any kind of fork. "The onus is on the developer to prove, through clever engineering, that there is no other choice," he said.

This is exactly what BOS hopes to achieve with BitSNARK. BitcoinOS has now open-sourced what Yago calls the “fully production-ready” BitSNARK protocol, which means developers can now perform zero-knowledge verification on Bitcoin and connect it to other blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Cardano.