At the Bitcoin 2025 conference held in Las Vegas, Bitlayer co-founder Charlie Hu shared with Bitpush the infrastructure construction of Bitcoin Layer 2, the future of Bitcoin native DeFi, and how they can release the "sleeping value" of BTC for institutional holders. Charlie believes that Bitcoin will usher in its own "DeFi Summer" - this is something worth looking forward to.
The following is a condensed version of the interview:
Bitpush: Can you share your experience and participation in this conference?
Charlie Hu: This is my sixth time attending a Bitcoin conference. I have been to Bitcoin Miami (three times), Bitcoin Amsterdam, and Bitcoin Asia before, and I think this may be one of the best organized conferences so far this year. Whether it is the convenience of the conference, the lineup of guests, or the opportunities for communication, it is all excellent. We, Bitlayer, are one of the sponsors of Enterprise Hall. This time, we also had in-depth exchanges with institutions such as 21Shares, Grayscale, and many potential partners to explore cooperation opportunities for ETF and ETP products.
Bitpush: What key products or infrastructure construction is Bitlayer working on recently?
Charlie Hu: Since its launch in April last year, our platform has processed more than 52 million transactions and Gas revenue has exceeded 10 million US dollars. Currently, it supports more than 280 projects, most of which are DeFi projects around our own ecosystem. Our core goal is to provide Bitcoin holders with the ability to "earn interest", that is, to allow them to earn income without selling Bitcoin.
We are building two core infrastructures: Big Mini Bridge + BVM (Bitcoin Virtual Machine): transfer Bitcoin assets from Layer 1 to the multi-chain ecosystem, and have established cooperation with Sui, Solana, Base, and Arbitrum; Bitcoin Verifier: allow Bitcoin L2 transactions to be finally verified and settled on the Bitcoin main chain, achieving true Bitcoin-level security.
Bitpush: Compared with Ethereum, Solana and other ecosystems, what do you think is the biggest difference between you?
Charlie Hu: Solana is a high-performance L1, but the threshold for verification nodes is high and the degree of centralization is relatively high; although the Ethereum ecosystem is rich, structural problems such as liquidity fragmentation have emerged after the transition from PoW to PoS.
The Bitcoin network is still the most secure and decentralized network. Our L2 uses packaged Bitcoin as Gas, and finally settles the transaction on the Bitcoin main chain, which has unique advantages in security, Gas cost, and native asset support.
Bitpush: Is it possible for Bitcoin to usher in its own DeFi Summer?
Charlie Hu: I firmly believe that Bitcoin will have its own DeFi Summer.
I participated in the DeFi wave of Ethereum in 2020, when projects such as Aave, Compound, and Uniswap began to explode. I did a lot of income farming, asset management, and trading at the time, and I personally experienced the growth of TVL from zero to tens of billions of dollars. In the past ten years, Bitcoin has almost no use cases except transfer and payment. Transfers are slow, Gas is expensive, and confirmation time takes 20 minutes. Although there is a lightning network, it can only solve payments. We want to bring real DeFi: lending, stablecoins, AMM DEX, perpetual contract trading, on-chain option protocols, prediction markets, etc. - all of which require Bitcoin to be programmable, which was impossible in the past.
Now, Bitcoin is the largest crypto asset with a value of nearly $3 trillion, with high popularity and wide recognition. Institutions such as BlackRock and Franklin Templeton hold a large number of Bitcoins through ETFs. These institutions will not sell Bitcoins in the next two or three years, but they cannot get any income from it, which is basically 0%. We hope to provide them with a risk-adjusted return of 2–10% as part of their asset strategy. And Bitlayer is to become this infrastructure.
Bitpush: Cross-chain and DeFi security issues are frequent. How do you deal with these challenges?
Charlie Hu: Yes, security issues are the core challenges on all chains at present. In terms of DeFi risks, it is not only Ethereum, but Sui was also recently attacked by Cetus. We actually cooperate with Sui and closely monitor the risks of such protocols. We only cooperate with high-quality protocols that have been strictly audited, and all smart contracts must be fully audited and properly managed by top security companies.
Hacker attacks are the "pain" of industry growth. Bybit was stolen $1.5 billion due to a multi-signature vulnerability, and many bridges have also been attacked. But the good news is that AI-driven protocol auditing and monitoring are progressing rapidly. The overall security of DeFi is constantly improving. We will not connect to any DeFi protocol casually. We choose to cooperate with experienced and proven old protocols, and we are also connecting to Uniswap. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, not reinventing the wheel from scratch. DeFi has proven its feasibility on Ethereum, and now we are migrating it to the more secure Bitcoin network.
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