Build on Bitcoin (BOB) co-founder Alexei Zamayatin is older than he looks folks: he’s been researching how to build “trustless” Bitcoin bridge architecture since 2018, long before it felt anything close to a mainstream conversation. 

When Robin Linus came out with BitVM, he believed he found the answer to this impossible problem, and has since poured his efforts into BitVM2 and BOB – a “hybrid L2” between Bitcoin and Ethereum.In this episode, we discussed:- Alexei’s long history researching Bitcoin bridges

- The academic work on distributed systems

- How BitVM changed the game for Bitcoin

- The hybrid architecture of BOB

- How BOB merged interop, Babylon, and BitVM bridgingThis episode is powered by Best In Slot—the leading API for Ordinals and BRC20 data aggregation and indexing.

TIMESTAMPS:___1:50 How did BOB come to be?

4:28 How early was the “Bitcoin L2” conversation?

5:45 The problem with merged mining

11:40 Alexei’s growing interest in Bitcoin DeFi

13:17 Never a fan of lightning

15:00 The Blocksize Wars begin

17:00 Academic early research on “distributed systems.”

19:40 Bitcoin’s “dark age” after SegWit

20:30 Alexei’s super early work on “trustless” bridging

22:10 Alexei’s PHD: Trustless bridging is impossible

25:00 Pre BitVM bridging solutions

28:40 Alexei’s work on Polkadot and intro to ZKPs

32:50 Ethereum is hard to verify

34:35 Starting work on BOB 

38:50 The Hybrid Consensus: Merged Mining and Ethereum Rollups

42:25 How BitVM derailed Alexei’s plans

47:00 Working with Robin Linus on a ZK bridge

49:35 SNARKs vs STARKs

50:35 The limitation of BitVM, how we’ve improved it

52:30 BitVM: Making challenging proofs permissionless

55:50 The challenge / response game of BitVM

59:55 BitVM2: Splitting programs to fit into Bitcoin blocks

01:03:00 Competition in the BitVM design space

01:05:00 Focusing on BOB, leaving BitVM to Fiamma

01:07:00 BOB is an “interoperable execution environment”01:09:00 Build in isolation; get liquidity fragmentation

01:10:30 Is BOB the most secure Bitcoin L2? 

01:13:05 How BitVM makes Babylon staking more secure

01:17:50 “Trust minimization dick measuring”

› https://x.com/alexeiZamyatin 

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