Enforcing arbitrary constraints on Bitcoin transactions

Federico Barbacovi; Enrique Larraia

Paper 2025/912

Enforcing arbitrary constraints on Bitcoin transactions

Federico Barbacovi

, Teranode Group

Enrique Larraia

Abstract

The challenge of enforcing constraints on Bitcoin transac- tions has recently gained a lot of attention. The current approach to solve this problem falls short in certain aspects, such as privacy and programmability. We design a new solution that leverages zkSNARKs and allows enforcing arbitrary constraints on Bitcoin transactions while maintaining some information private. Our approach also bypasses the non-Turing completeness of Bitcoin Script, allowing the enforcement of unbounded constraints, namely constraints that repeat a certain opera- tion an unbounded number of times.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: Bitcoin Zero Knowledge Smart Contract
Contact author(s): f barbacovi @ teranode group
elarraia @ gmail com
History: 2025-05-23: approved; 2025-05-21: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2025/912
License: CC BY-NC-ND

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/912,
      author = {Federico Barbacovi and Enrique Larraia},
      title = {Enforcing arbitrary constraints on Bitcoin transactions},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/912},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/912}
}