According to Tadge Dryja, cryptocurrency research scientist at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative is thinking of a scaling technique enable Bitcoin to run on phones, and he named it “utreexo”.

At the moment, if Bitcoin users want to download Bitcoin “full node”, they have to download the whole transactions history (which is around 200 gigabytes). With UTXO, holders just need to verify if the information is correct using cryptographic proofs. This initiative could help cut down on storage requirement, allowing users to run Bitcoin on a mobile phone.

Also called an accumulator, the idea of UTXO is not exactly new. Developers have been discussing the concept since the early age of Bitcoin, but it was previously stumbling with obstacles.

Step by step, Dryja and other cryptography experts including Dan Boneh, Ben Fisch, and Benedikt Bünz are making it a reality. They were already able to create a functioning proof-of-concept code.

It is also worth mentioning that accumulators do not require a hard fork or soft fork to implement this update, it can just only be deployed at the wallet level, reducing complication in the space.

“Hard forks are almost impossible on Bitcoin. Soft forks are hard as well,” Bünz said, adding: “It’s great that we can just deploy it, it makes it a lot easier and it means we can have a competition of ideas.”