A VISUAL FIELD GUIDE TO CLIENT-SIDE VALIDATION
Six short films compare the architectures, trace their proof models, measure performance, and put formal verification inside its proper trust boundary.
FIELD NOTE 01 / OVERVIEW
Shielded CSV, Taproot Assets, RGB, and Ultraviolet—compared by privacy, proof growth, Bitcoin footprint, and trust model.
THE PROTOCOLS / ONE AT A TIME
02 — 04FIELD NOTE 02 / SHIELDED CSV
The sender proves a valid private state transition, Bitcoin orders the spend, and the receiver gets a fresh coin plus a proof-carrying record.
FIELD NOTE 03 / TAPROOT ASSETS
Asset commitments live beneath a Taproot output. Proof files move off-chain, trace lineage to genesis, and can travel over Lightning.
FIELD NOTE 04 / RGB
A single-use seal ties contract rights to a Bitcoin outpoint. The recipient receives a private consignment and replays the relevant history.
FIELD NOTE 05 / MEASURED
The reference circuit contains 1,024 rows and 457 columns. Standard proofs complete in 70–84 ms on the measured laptop; hiding proofs trade more time and memory for privacy.
Measured CPU benchmarks. Research software; not audited.
FIELD NOTE 06 / FORMAL VERIFICATION
Ultraviolet writes adversarial state models in Quint, checks their invariants with Apalache, replays generated traces against Rust, and applies Kani to selected production functions.
Then the July 2026 AI-assisted Collatz artifact shows the limit: two checkers accepted it through two different bugs. A green check proves only what the full toolchain actually checked.
THE DESIGN QUESTION
Ultraviolet explores constant-size receive proofs for private client-side validation on Bitcoin.