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Making money on your bitcoin has never been easier. Stacks' sBTC is letting you do that while remaining liquid. Babylon is seeing record-high TVL numbers of 55,592 BTC ($6 billion). Scroll announces OpenVM, an all-new open source zkVM framework.

Babylon delegations by finality provider:

The chart highlights the distribution of BTC delegations among Babylon's top finality providers. During the “Cap-3” deposit window, BTC deposits to Babylon surpassed total net flows for all bitcoin ETFs from Tuesday to Thursday last week.

A single whale staker made waves by depositing 10,000 BTC ($1 billion), signaling significant institutional or large-scale participation. Over 132,000 participants in total were involved in Cap-3 — no doubt juiced by some speculative airdrop farming — and Babylon's total value locked (TVL) now exceeds 57,290k BTC ($6.1 billion).

Top providers like Lombard and Solv Protocol are leading significant delegation volumes, followed by a long tail of decentralized staking adoption.

— Macauley Peterson (X: @yeluacaM | Farcaster: @Macauley)

Announcing OpenVM

Today, Scroll, Axiom, developer Max Gillet and the Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy & Scaling Explorations (PSE) team are announcing OpenVM, an open-source zkVM framework for instant proving.

OpenVM will be adopted by the Scroll L2 as its zkVM, and plans to validate mainnet blocks in coming months. This transitions Scroll from a currently Type-3 to a Type-1 zkEVM — the most fully Ethereum-equivalent zkEVM type.

Scroll’s upgrade to a Stage-1 rollup with a fully functioning proof system will follow soon thereafter.

According to a press release, Scroll’s decision to design a new zkVM from the ground up was driven by a belief that many existing zkVM solutions were “monolithic” and “locking developers into vertically integrated stacks.”

OpenVM’s open-source and modular architecture would enable Scroll to introduce features without making changes to the underlying circuit, and developers to benefit from zkVM improvements without having to modify application code.

The state of ZK

OpenVM joins a market already crowded with zkVMs. Unlike traditional virtual machines, zkVMs are designed to compile and execute smart contracts into zero-knowledge proofs in a secure and private way that does not reveal underlying data.

Today, the zkVM market carries at least a dozen different zkVMs, such as RISC Zero “RISC0” and Succinct’s “SP1.”

As seen in the below chart, proofs submitted to Ethereum mainnet saw a peak in December 2023, largely coming from zk rollups like Linea, ZKsync and Scroll, rather than applications. Proof volumes saw a drop in 2024, largely due to two factors.

One, proof generation has been increasingly batched using recursive proof aggregation — a technique that verifies multiple proofs within one proof — to reduce costs. 

Second, proof verification is getting more efficient, so costs are steeply declining from just a year ago.

“Prover networks” like Risc Zero’s “Boundless” and Fermah have also helped apps and rollups to bring zk-proving costs down. These networks allow teams to outsource proof generation to specialized hardware providers with ASICs and GPUs that compete to generate zk proofs cheaply.

Based on Electric Capital’s recent developer report, there are 2,054 monthly active developers working in zk. The use of zk has seen tremendous growth, with zk contract deployments growing from 40 to 639 today over the last four years.

— Donovan Choy (X: @donovanchoy | Farcaster: @donovan)

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SKALE, the gas-free invisible blockchain, is “Built Different” for mass adoption: high-throughput, scalable, and fair. As a network of interoperable EVM-compatible L1s, SKALE’s user experience focus has accelerated a strong ecosystem across gaming, AI, and more. Due to SKALE’s gas-free nature, blockchain can be integrated invisibly, creating accessible Web2-like experiences for users and developers.

SKALE has:

• Over 50M UAWs

• 9 Games on the Epic Games Store

• Saved Users over $9.5B on Gas Fees

Double-dipping with sBTC on Stacks

Bitcoin maxis, it’s time to take notice — sBTC on Stacks is here, and it’s designed to let your bitcoin work overtime, according to Andre Serrano, head of product at Stacks.

"The nice thing about this is that you are eligible for this yield both by holding it as well as deploying it in DeFi,” Serrano told Blockworks.

Here’s the alpha:

1. Mint and hold sBTC — by bridging bitcoin into sBTC (a 1:1 bitcoin-backed asset secured via Stacks), users become eligible for rewards (bitcoinismore.org) paid out in bitcoin, not points or inflationary tokens. Rewards are distributed every two weeks —  BTC in, BTC out — simple and clean

2. Deploy in DeFi — The rewards don’t need to stop there. Stacks-native DeFi protocols like Zest offer additional incentives on top of the base 5%. For example, by supplying sBTC in Zest, a bitcoin liquidity protocol, users can stack another 6-7% APY in extra incentives.


The kicker? Unlike other BTC-pegged solutions, sBTC stays liquid — you don’t need to stake or lock it up to earn rewards. However, there’s one caveat: Withdrawals back to the Bitcoin network will only be enabled in March 2025. So, for the most trust-minimized way to bridge back, you’ll need to wait.

But sBTC is expected to soon be bridgeable to chains like Solana and Aptos via Axelar, anticipated for January. So, there could be a circuitous route back to Bitcoin via these protocols, subject to liquidity constraints.

On Stacks, sBTC currently relies on a threshold signature 15-key multisig setup, where 15 signers from the community manage deposits and withdrawals. This operates under an honest majority assumption, meaning at least 8 of the 15 signers must act honestly for the system to remain secure.

To bolster trust, Stacks has onboarded reputable, professional signers like Blockdaemon and Kiln, firms known for securing billions in assets across multiple chains. These signers also post collateral and earn bitcoin rewards for maintaining the protocol, aligning incentives to ensure security.

Looking ahead, the plan is to gradually decentralize the system by integrating sBTC into the Stacks consensus mechanism, where all Stacks signers will eventually participate. This will further enhance security, bringing trust assumptions closer to those of Stacks itself.

— Macauley Peterson

Emerging technologies including AI and blockchain are set to transform society, but they often involve sensitive information. For these technologies to realize their full potential, private data sharing and privacy-preserving computation are essential prerequisites.

In the latest report from Blockworks Research, analyst Daniel Shapiro breaks down how emerging Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) could enable secure collaboration without compromising privacy, making it possible for individuals and organizations to leverage data across partners, users, and systems.

Filecoin is at an inflection point

Blockworks Research analyst Ryan Connor drops the alpha on FIL, with catalysts such as programmability (FEVM, IPC) and a nascent DeFi ecosystem addressing prior adoption bottlenecks.

Among the key actionable insights:

• Enterprise-ready storage: Projects like Storacha (hot storage) and Akave (hybrid storage) are achieving near-AWS parity at lower costs, making Filecoin competitive for cloud clients and Web3-native startups.

• DeFi growth case: Tools like GLIF (borrow/lend, iFIL LST) and USDFC (FIL-backed stablecoin) are unlocking permissionless capital for Storage Providers (SPs), reducing FIL volatility and enabling expansion.

For more on DeFi-backed FIL loans tied to data retrievability scores, and investment timing insights, and how Filecoin can capture a meaningful share of the $300b cloud storage market, check out the full report.

• Nuffle Labs and Wormhole introduced native cross-chain restaking, reducing bridging risks. Leveraging Wormhole's messaging and Nuffle’s NFFL AVS, assets can restake seamlessly across chains via EigenLayer, enhancing liquidity, shared security and interoperability for a more interconnected blockchain ecosystem.

• Saga launched Mainnet 2.0, partnering with Uniswap to enable gasless DeFi on its multichain protocol. The Liquidity Integration Layer (LiL), launching in Q1 2025, looks to unify liquidity across ecosystems, automate routing and eliminate complex bridges.

• Omni Network launched Core mainnet, a low-latency protocol for cross-rollup communication, aimed at addressing Ethereum’s fragmented rollup ecosystem. Built with the Octane framework and secured via Ethereum restaking, Core supports major networks like Arbitrum and Optimism, enabling efficient interoperability and serving as the foundation for Omni’s upcoming SolverNet and Orderflow Engine.