Blockstream Research
Research that moves Bitcoin forward.
A team advancing the cryptography and protocols beneath Bitcoin. The work is published openly and contributed upstream.
A team advancing the cryptography and protocols beneath Bitcoin. The work is published openly and contributed upstream.
The hard problems sit one layer below the wallet. We work on those.
Signature schemes, contract languages, privacy techniques, and the cryptography Bitcoin will need decades from now. Each result is published for review and contributed back to the protocol, so anyone can read it, check it, and build on it.
Work on the Schnorr and Taproot building blocks, including MuSig2 for multisignatures and ROAST for threshold signing that finishes even when signers fail.
Miniscript and Simplicity: languages that make Bitcoin contracts easier to read, analyze, and verify before they ever run.
Confidential transactions that hide amounts on chain, plus protocol-efficiency work that lets Bitcoin do more with less.
Hash-based signatures and the path to a Bitcoin that stays secure once quantum computers can break today's elliptic-curve cryptography.
A sample of what the team has published and contributed. Source and discussion live on GitHub.
Today's signatures rest on elliptic-curve cryptography that a large quantum computer could break. The team's post-quantum work studies hash-based signatures and how to bring them to Bitcoin without a hard fork in a hurry.
Proposal: OP_CHECKSHRINCSThe research turns into reference implementations, specifications, and libraries that developers use in production. Everything is open and contributed upstream.
Follow the work, read the proposals, and build on the results.
