Bridging Bitcoin to Second Layers via BitVM2

A holy grail in blockchain infrastructure is a trustless bridge between Bitcoin and its second layers or other chains. We make progress toward this vision by introducing the first light-client-based Bitcoin bridge. At its heart lies BitVM2-CORE, a novel paradigm that enables arbitrary program execution on Bitcoin, combining Turing-complete expressiveness with the security of Bitcoin consensus. BitVM2-BRIDGE advances prior approaches by reducing the trust assumption from an honest majority (t-of-n) to existential honesty (1-of-n) during setup. Liveness is guaranteed with only one rational operator, and any user can act as a challenger, enabling permissionless verification. A production-level implementation of BitVM2 has been developed, and a full challenge verification has been executed on the Bitcoin mainnet.