BitVM

https://bitvm.org/bitvm.pdf

Credit: Robin Linus

This is a protocol that pairs of users can deploy to condition payments on arbitrary computations with a small on-chain footprint. The method uses a challenge-response scheme to arbitrate disputes and reveal transcript fragments, like MATT. At this time, computations must be expressible as a small NAND circuit. However, the scheme can be deployed today without a soft fork.

UTXOracle.py

https://utxo.live/oracle/

Credit: @SteveSimple

This is a method for fitting a price model to UTXO output values to infer an exchange rate exclusively from blockchain data.

BIP 324 lands in Bitcoin Core

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/28331

Credit: sipa

With this change, peers can negotiate up to the BIP324 P2P protocol, which provides message confidentiality and integrity.

Scaling Lightning With Simple Covenants

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2023-September/004092.html

Credit: John Law

This post explains how APO and CTV can be combined with the technique of tunable penalties in order to achieve impressive scaling for the lightning network.

Payment Splitting & Switching

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2023-September/004114.html

Credit: Gijs van Dam

Prior work showed that LN is susceptible to the Balance Discovery Attack that allows for individual channel balances to be revealed, threatening users’ privacy. In this work we introduce Payment Splitting and Switching (PSS), a way of splitting up payments in LN at intermediary hops along the payment path. PSS drastically reduces the information an attacker can obtain through a BDA. Using real-world data in an LN simulator we demonstrate that the information gain for the attacker drops up to 62% when PSS is deployed.

Undetectable selfish mining

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06847v1

Credit: Maryam Bahrani, S. Matthew Weinberg

This paper presents a selfish mining algorithm that does not produce a known statistical footprint.