Built on Bitcoin with Jacob Brown GLOCK: A Better BitVM with David Seroy - Ecosystem Lead at Alpen Labs
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Oct 27, 2025 
Join David Seroy, Ecosystem Lead at Alpen Labs and Bitcoin researcher, as he dives into the cutting-edge innovations surrounding Bitcoin. Discover GLOCK, a novel approach to improve BitVM using garbled circuits. Unearth how zero-knowledge proofs can revolutionize Bitcoin's scalability and trust models. David also explores the future of ZK technology, the significance of soft-fork upgrades, and the exciting potential of multilingual execution environments. His insights highlight a dynamic period of innovation within Bitcoin's evolving landscape.
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ZK Proofs Reignite Bitcoin Innovation
- Advances in zero-knowledge proofs rekindled Bitcoin as an innovation hub and enabled off-chain functionality without changing the base layer.
- These cryptographic gains allow expressive, scalable applications while preserving Bitcoin's core security model.
BitVM’s Real Goal: ZK Verification
- BitVM showed Bitcoin can arbitrate arbitrary off-chain computation, but the practical goal is verifying ZK proofs, which enables everything else.
- Verifying ZK proofs on L1 is the core primitive needed to support diverse L2s.
Plan For Prover Censorship, Not Theft
- Don’t conflate centralized provers with theft risk: provers cannot steal funds but can censor by withholding proofs.
- Prepare fallback measures so others can spin up proving and submit proofs if the prover goes offline.