StarkWare’s newly unveiled ColliderVM aims to bring scalable, trust-minimized bridges to Bitcoin using validity rather than fraud proofs. It promises capital efficiency and simplicity over BitVM2, but critics say it’s computationally prohibitive. The race is on to find an approach that works both in theory and in practice.

In other news…are you coming to Permissionless IV Brooklyn in June? Tickets are $399 (for now!) but you can get one for half price with a unique 50% off discount code if you successfully refer 10 new subscribers to the 0xResearch newsletter. Scroll down for details.

OM crash:

The OM token experienced a dramatic market decline early Sunday, with its market cap plummeting from $6 billion to ~$500 million. CEXs racked up $64.7m of liquidations in a 12 hour window, based on CoinGlass data. OKX founder Star Xu described the crash as a "major scandal for the crypto industry."

OM is the native token of the MANTRA RWA-focused L1 blockchain. With a paltry $4m in TVL and a relatively recent mainnet launch (October 2024), MANTRA is not known for its product success. 

Instead, MANTRA is infamously known for the fact that its OM token defied the gravity of a crypto market crash in early February. When the broader crypto market bled a ~$300b market cap in the first week of February, OM saw a 27% pump on the week, leading to Twitter scrutiny around its market making practices.

Contrary to accusations of insider token selling, MANTRA CEO JP Mullin claimed that the recent dump was due to “reckless forced closures initiated by centralized exchanges” during low-liquidity hours. 

Based on Arkham data, a wallet allegedly tagged to Laser Digital was seen depositing ~$42m in OM to OKX, presumably to dump. Laser Digital is the crypto venture arm of the Nomura bank and is indeed an investor in MANTRA, though the team has strongly denied any involvement with the associated wallets.

— Donovan Choy

Permissionless IV is where the builders show up — devs, founders, protocol teams, product minds. No waiting on the next bull. Just shipping.

The lineup: Jesse Pollak, Hayden Adams, Kain Warwick, Mert Mumtaz, Smokey the Bera + more.

The themes: Infra, AI x crypto, modular, DeFi, consumer apps, Bitcoin, token design.

💻 Hackathon: $100K+ in bounties

🎟️ Developer tickets available

📅 June 22–26 | Brooklyn, NY

StarkWare’s latest Bitcoin scaling play

Bitcoin is a dumb base layer. In its native scripting environment, computation is stateless, meaning each transaction is validated independently — with no built-in memory of prior events or intermediate results. This limits Bitcoin to simple, one-off logic like multisig, timelocks or a basic inheritance contract.

True Bitcoin layer-2 (L2) networks will need stateful computation on Bitcoin, which is where StarkWare’s newly proposed ColliderVM comes in. 

The idea is to let Bitcoin validate complex computation across transactions, something which not long ago was thought to require a new soft fork upgrade. While still in the early phases of development, ColliderVM joins a growing class of trust-minimized L2 bridge architectures that seek to bypass the current stalemate around new Bitcoin opcodes like CTV or CAT. No forks required.

ColliderVM builds on ideas from BitVM2 and StarkWare’s earlier ColliderScript, using hash-collision-based puzzles to pass data across Bitcoin transactions. This makes it “at least x10,000 more efficient” than ColliderScript, according to StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson.

But as Robin Linus, creator of BitVM, noted to Blockworks that may not be as impressive as it sounds, since “ColliderScript is impractically slow.”

ColliderVM avoids the fraud proofs central to BitVM2. That means operators aren’t forced to prepay withdrawals while waiting for fraud windows to expire. Instead, computation is validity-based and verified directly on Bitcoin.

“Think of this as step two on the journey to deliver [zk validity proofs],” Ben-Sasson told Blockworks.

The tradeoff is cost. As Bitcoin PIPES creator Misha Komarov puts it: “It requires about 30 hours of the whole Bitcoin network hash rate compute to spend one covenant. [That] results in a cost of millions of dollars [he estimates $40m] per tx.”

Ben-Sasson acknowledges that ColliderVM is still expensive, and not ready for prime time. “The newly released research is important because it shows that it works — not that it’s financially viable,” he said.

However, ColliderVM’s capital efficiency and simplicity, with no need for onlookers or interactive challenge protocols, may appeal to developers frustrated by BitVM2’s complexity.

Linus himself is looking forward to further Bitcoin upgrades. “CTV is great for BitVM,” he said, especially when paired with CSFS to “eliminate the existential honesty assumption” and simplify bridge logic. ColliderVM, on the other hand, circumvents the need for CTV entirely — but at the cost of real-world feasibility, for now. That could change with the advent of specialized hardware.

Meanwhile, PIPES represents an alternative approach — one preferred by Botanix Labs’ co-founder Willem Schroé. In his view, BitVM is “too complex” and ColliderVM is “brilliant, but energy-intensive.” PIPES is “very simple, very clean, but very theoretical and might not work.”

Komarov agrees. “PIPES, in comparison to this hash collisions trick, are much more experimental from the theoretical point of view,” he told Blockworks. “But once they work, they’re much cheaper.”

Schroé has strong views on the bridge verification space. Regardless of what approach becomes production-ready first, he thinks they do something crucial: They show users want covenant-like behavior.

“Bitcoin Core is not even thinking about covenants,” Schroé said. “But PIPES and Collider allow you to show that demand.”

Botanix’s Spiderchain uses a federated proof-of-stake validator set that can scale over time. While it starts with 15 handpicked orchestrators, it’s expected to expand to thousands. “Let’s build a proper successful sidechain and then show to Bitcoin Core the demand,” Schroé’s thinking goes.

Whether ColliderVM is the path forward remains to be seen — but it’s another signal that Bitcoin L2 proponents are not waiting for protocol changes. It’s still early days, Ben-Sasson explained.

“[As] with many technologies, this will continue to unfold, and subsequent steps are likely to further reduce costs,” he said. “We’ve proved it’s possible; now the challenge is to make it viable.”

— Macauley Peterson

Balancer deploys on Avalanche

The Balancer DEX launched its v3 deployment on the Avalanche L1 chain over the weekend. It marks the second DEX to launch on Avalanche this month, after Euler.

Balancer’s v3 brings with it a slew of new primitives like custom pool types and Uniswap v4-style hooks. There is currently the “stable surge” hook, which increases swap fees to reward LPs during market volatility to protect stablecoin pegs.

About 83 pools are being boosted with token incentives right now. The top TVL pools, USDT-GHO-USDC on Ethereum, is seeing about $10k in weekly incentives. Meanwhile, GHO-USDC on Base is giving out about $24k in weekly incentives.

— Donovan Choy