Robert Linus – project lead at Bitcoin development group ZeroSync – has proposed a new system allowing developers to “compute anything on Bitcoin,” giving it functionality more similar to its neighboring crypto network Ethereum.

Unlike other proposals to expand Bitcoin’s capabilities, “BitVM” does not require any changes to Bitcoin’s code that could cause the network and community to contentiously rift apart.

What is BitVM?

According to the project’s whitepaper published on Monday, BitVM is a “computing paradigm to express Turing complete Bitcoin contracts.”

Rather than executing complex computations on the blockchain itself, the system suggests that they merely be “verified” on Bitcoin, with computation done off-chain. Linus likened the system to optimistic rollups – an Ethereum scaling solution that processes many transactions off-chain before posting them in batches to the main chain.

“This enables more expressive Bitcoin contracts,” explained Linus over Twitter. “Particularly, it enables functionality that we thought we’d need a soft fork for.”

Linus said this could make games like “Chess, Go, or Poker” possible on Bitcoin. He also suggested that it might enable “trustless sidechains” for Bitcoin, meaning BTC could be reliably bridged to other networks without the need for centralization, though this possibility remains uncertain.

The Bitcoin community has hotly debated implementing the “Drivechains” upgrade this year, which would create a system for trustless bridges and blind merge mining on Bitcoin. Theoretically, this could make BTC transactions more private, programmable, and efficient.

However, the risks of implementing and coordinating the upgrade, which would change Bitcoin’s consensus rules, made many skeptical of the proposal. According to Drivecha