StarkWare, a company specializing in zero-knowledge (ZK) technology, a way of verifying information without revealing the specific contents of that information, said it created a ZK verification of the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain that can run on mobile devices.
The proof contains all the Bitcoin block headers from the genesis block until the present, but not the full and detailed Bitcoin blockchain history, which is over 680 gigabytes in size.
Each block header includes the version number of the Bitcoin software used to mine the block, a reference to the previous block in the chain, a timestamp, the block size and the nonce — the random number the miner has to find to add the block to the ledger.
StarkWare’s BTC ledger proof comes in at just 1 megabyte (MB) in size, to provide users with a way of verifying transactions in under 100 milliseconds, Abdelhamid Bakhta, head of ecosystem at StarkWare, told Cointelegraph.
The lightweight client builds on Simplified Payment Verification (SPV), a concept outlined in Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, which allows smaller lightweight nodes a way of verifying payments without having to download the full ledger.
StarkWare’s announcement is significant in that it will allow any user to verify Bitcoin payments without setting up a full Bitcoin node, which can cost between $300 to $1,000, and may be too technically complex for the average user to properly install.
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Node storage requirements and ledger size become points of contention in the BTC community
The requirements to run a Bitcoin node are relatively easier than those of other blockchain networks, which may require tens of thousands of dollars to run.
Bitcoin nodes can run on retail personal computers due to the relative simplicity of the Bitcoin protocol, which has generated only 680 gigabytes of data since 2009.
This relative simplicity and accessible hardware requirements are key to preserving decentralization of the protocol and maintaining Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism, which is enforced by independent node runners.
If nodes become too expensive because of mounting hardware requirements, the network becomes centralized under large service providers with the resources to run the required hardware, going against Bitcoin’s core value proposition.
Inscriptions, ordinals, and other forms of non-monetary data storage on the blockchain create this centralization risk by increasing the size of the ledger and requiring node operators to store significant amounts of non-monetary data, critics say.
In May, Bitcoin Core, the developers of the software used by about 80% of BTC node runners, announced that the upcoming Bitcoin Core 30 update, slated for release in October, will remove the OP_Return limit, which caps the amount of non-monetary data that can be embedded in Bitcoin transactions.
The OP_Return limit is currently 80 bytes, far too small to store the majority of images and multimedia content today, and the proposed change has prompted a historic surge in users running Bitcoin Knots nodes.
Bitcoin Knots is an alternative Bitcoin node software and features more customizable parameters, including options for the node runners to limit the amount of OP_Return data they will store in their memory pools and relay to other nodes.
Knots nodes now account for nearly 20% of the network in 2025 — an almost vertical increase from the end of 2024, when Knots nodes accounted for about 1% of the total market share.
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