StarkWare, the agency on the assist of layer 2 blockchain community Starknet, presented Tuesday the introduction of a $1 million grant fund dedicated in opposition to researching Bitcoin’s OP_CAT proposal. StarkWare’s fund is a weird switch geared in opposition to scaling Bitcoin “to many thousands of transactions per 2d,” per a blog post by StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson.

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In step with a commentary shared with Unchained, StarkWare is no longer easiest making willing to own “willing-to-roll brilliant plans” the 2d OP_CAT is licensed nonetheless is additionally committed to setting up a seven-resolve fund to promote examine into OP_CAT’s advantages and its probably routes to adoption. For StarkWare, the approval of OP_CAT is a preliminary step to incorporating its ZK abilities into Bitcoin.

“As soon as OP_CAT is adopted on Bitcoin, implementing a STARK verifier in Bitcoin Script becomes a actuality. This opens a path to switch safely and self-custodially between Bitcoin and Starknet, surroundings up a single Layer 2 to scale both Ethereum and Bitcoin,” wrote Ben-Sasson.

StarkWare’s announcement comes roughly eight months after two developers, Ethan Heilman and Armin Sabouri, created a Bitcoin Enchancment Proposal (BIP) to reintroduce OP_CAT as an opcode for Tapscript, the programming language outdated to script Taproot-enabled Bitcoin transactions.

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Satoshi Nakamoto before every little thing place included OP_CAT to affix two recordsdata aspects in the Bitcoin code stack, nonetheless sunsetted it in 2010, because, on the time, a malicious actor can also dangle goal appropriate thing in regards to the function to habits a denial of provider (DoS) attack. Alternatively, the 2021 Taproot upgrade included a swap that can prevent a person from the utilization of OP_CAT to habits a DoS attack, thus making it conceivable to reintroduce the function with out likelihood.

StarkWare is no longer basically the most animated crew geared in opposition to supporting the Bitcoin OP_CAT proposal. Taproot Wizards, a Bitcoin-centered Ordinals mission, launched a non-fungible token sequence called “Quantum Cats” in Feb. 2024 to purple meat up the restoration of the OP_CAT scripting function.

“StarkWare is in general unsuitable for being an Ethereum maxi, even though basically we’re scaling maxis. We’re mass-impart maxis,” talked about Ben-Sasson. “We’re supporting OP_CAT because we predict Bitcoin can own to play a more central position in society and we predict that the OP_CAT Bitcoin restful fork is the safest route for Bitcoin to scale.”