Series → #Vanta In Practice
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BIP-199 by hand: a code walk through vanta-swap
A line-by-line tour of the Rust HTLC state machine that drives BTC ↔ VANTA atomic swaps. Redeem script bytes, the 2x/1x timelock dance, BIP143 sighash binding, and the witness layout that makes refund and claim routes provably distinct.
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What's in vanta/papers — reading 17 design docs in 2026
Vanta ships its whitepaper as 17 markdown files in the repo, not a PDF on a marketing page. This is the tour: what each doc covers, which one has the wording bug, and why the docs live next to the code.
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Mining VANTA with a Bitaxe BM1368
A 350 GH/s, ~12 W open-hardware ASIC plugged into a Stratum server I wrote against my own L1. Solo mining isn't economic on Bitcoin in 2026. On a 1-minute-block fork with 100k subsidy, the math changes.
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btc-tunnel.sh: SSH-jumping into a remote bitcoind for swap testing
Three small bash scripts wire the desktop dev environment to a real mainnet bitcoind for atomic-swap testing. Tunneling, RPC wrapping, and an address watcher with auto-reconnect — and why exposing 8332 to the internet is a worse idea than you think.
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Why we shipped SP1 instead of RISC Zero
Vanta's earliest design notes said 'RISC Zero zkVM.' Production ships SP1 + Plonky3. The swap was cheap because the privacy protocol is independent of the prover. Here is why we moved, what stayed the same, and what the FFI verifier looks like.
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L1 nullifier sets: enforcing no-double-spend at consensus
Most privacy chains track spent notes in a wallet-side index and pray. Vanta puts the nullifier set in chainstate and lets the consensus rules do the praying. Here's why that line moved, and what it costs.
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Private atomic swaps and the price-discovery problem
BTC ↔ VANTA atomic swaps via HTLC are the easy part. If the VANTA leg is shielded, no observer can compute the rate, and no rate means no public price. Walking through six designs and the hybrid recommendation in vanta/planning.
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Vanta: a Bitcoin fork with ZK at consensus
42 billion supply. 1-minute blocks. RISC Zero proofs verified at consensus. The opinionated answer to 'why fork Bitcoin in 2026?' is that you're not really forking Bitcoin — you're shipping a different L1 that has Bitcoin's surface area.
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The unified dashboard: collapsing private and transparent into one wallet view
Two pages — one for private balance, one for transparent — taught users to think in two heads. The 2026-04-17 commit folded them. The wallet now shows one balance, one feed, with the privacy boundary inside the data, not the URL.