We are delighted to share that Lukas Aumayr has received the 2025 Bitcoin Research Prize for the paper “BitVM2: Bridging Bitcoin to Second Layers,” co-authored with Robin Linus, Lukas Aumayr, Zeta Avarikioti, Matteo Maffei, Andrea Pelosi, Orfeas Thyfronitis Litos, Christos Stefo, David Tse, and Alexei Zamyatin. The announcement was made by Chaincode Labs, who award the prize each year.
Announcement link: https://x.com/ClaraShik/status/1985741777861476584
The award was presented on 7 November 2025 at Chaincode Labs’ offices in New York City during their Bitcoin Research Day (BRD): https://brd.chaincode.com/
BRD included several technical talks, and Chaincode invited the BitVM2 authors to attend the event in person. Lukas was present, along with some of his coauthors, and Robin Linus gave a talk on the paper.
The talks were recorded and are expected to appear on Chaincode’s YouTube channel in the coming weeks:
https://www.youtube.com/@chaincode/videos
The paper itself is available on the IACR ePrint archive:
https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1158
BitVM2 builds on earlier work in the BitVM project, which explores how more expressive computation might be verified on Bitcoin while still staying within Bitcoin’s existing constraints. The idea has attracted attention because this was previously thought to be impossible or impractical, and Lukas notes how surprising and exciting the progress has been.
Lukas’ comment on the award
“I feel honoured that our work was selected for the 2025 Bitcoin Research Prize. When Robin first told me about BitVM, I was genuinely surprised, since the community (including me) had long believed that expressing quasi-Turing-complete computation on Bitcoin was impossible. It has been inspiring to see how far the project has come, and it has been great to be part of the BitVM journey and this wonderful research community. And of course, a huge thanks to my amazing co-authors!”
