BTC renaissance is here...time to focus on Layer 2 and DeFi potential

Grayscale, the issuer of the Bitcoin spot ETF GBTC and crypto asset manager, has released a report declaring that “a renaissance has arrived in the Bitcoin ecosystem. The world's first public blockchain is evolving,” the report said. “The success of Audience, Inscription, and others has sparked a new wave of development aimed at introducing smart contracts to the Bitcoin blockchain and increasing transaction throughput. The Bitcoin development community today is similar to the early days of Ethereum (ETH) in early 2017, when decentralized applications (DApps) were just emerging. Over the next 15 years, we expect the suite of Bitcoin-based decentralized finance (DeFi) products to expand, and the security provided by scaling solutions, such as Layer 2 solutions, can increase miners' hash power and provide additional income streams for miners. Furthermore, the Bitcoin network can also excel as a smart contract platform.”

Grayscale also cites the following as key innovations in the Bitcoin ecosystem today: BitVM integration rollups such as Build on Bitcoin (BOB), SpiderChain (Botanix Labs), Bitcoin re-staking solutions (Babylon), Bitcoin-based DeFi, and Taproot assets.