I spent the last two-three months scanning Bitcoin open source repositories. After talking with a lot of people about how they approach their scan procedures, I realized there's a lot to talk about. The pace is surreal, and it's very hard to keep up.

Therefore, here's my first attempt: a practical guide to scanning things!

I intentionally kept it focused on things that are **simple and cheap** - many people simply do not have the same power, money, resources, or time as a frontier lab or a professional red teamer.

However, there're a lot of practical things to reduce this barrier, and I hope this article helps you realize the world we're going to have and easy wins you can apply to be prepared more.

Hope it helps!

with the zerosats payments protocol, we demonstrated that zero-knowledge-based payments systems can interact directly with the lightning network via zkHTLC circuits.

future protocols (@ShieldedCSV, shielded bitcoin, and more) will likely leverage similar constructions to facilitate lightning payments.

the talk below covers the design and our approach to building the contracts (around 120~ LOC with @NoirLang).

Introducing Zark

Zark is live on Mutinynet.

Protocol writeup: hackmd.io/@januszgrze/HJ…

Code: github.com/zerosats/zark-…

Binaries: github.com/zerosats/zark-…

Web wallet: zark.lx.dev

icymi: we sponsored research report from @gusgutoski on shielded csv, a proposal that improves scalability and privacy for bitcoin payments

you can read the report here:

ggutoski.github.io/shielded-csv-t…

in nyc for @OPNEXT2026?

join us at @PubKey for the official op_next after party and have a beer on us

(or 5)

releasing our latest work

making a zerocash-style appchain compatible with bitcoin

notably, we modified the chain’s utxo circuit to support mints & burns leveraging bitcoin collateral locked in blind, bitcoin L1 vaults

this work is free and open-source under the MIT license: github.com/zerosats/ciphe…