A Grant Proposal Would Let Optimism Verify Bitcoin Transactions Without Trusting a Bridge

A grant proposal posted to Optimism's governance forum on November 7, 2026 by a contributor identified as Justin Quinn lays out a plan to let the Optimism network verify Bitcoin transactions directly, without relying on the kind of trusted multisignature bridge operators that most existing Bitcoin interoperability solutions depend on today. The proposed system, named BitcoinMerkleVerifier_ZK, would use zero-knowledge cryptography to prove that a given Bitcoin transaction is included in a block's Merkle tree, the cryptographic data structure Bitcoin uses to efficiently summarize all...