With 2024 now here, Cointelegraph’s Hashing It Out podcast is focusing on narratives that are tipped to be at the heart of the cryptocurrency conversation this year.
In episode 45, Rich Rines, an initial contributor to Core DAO — a layer-1 blockchain network that can accommodate Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible decentralized applications on top of Bitcoin’s governance — explains how BRC-20 tokens and the movement to build utility and financial applications on top of the Bitcoin network (BTCFi) could take off in 2024.
Rines explains why there is a place for BRC-20 in the Bitcoin ecosystem despite ideological debates and technical criticisms. He also describes how BRC-20 and BTCFi can build a sustainable economic environment on Bitcoin with lessons from decentralized finance (DeFi) implementations on Ethereum and other layer-1 networks.
Hashing It Out host Elisha Owusu Akyaw asked Rines if Bitcoin was boring before BRC-20. Rines explains that Ordinals and BRC-20 have led to some innovation and excitement in the Bitcoin ecosystem that was missing.
He says that being digital gold could be boring to a certain degree, but it provides an essential real-world use case that cannot be ignored. For him, Bitcoin was not boring before BRC-20, but BRC-20 brought some excitement that did not previously exist.
On the ideological debate about whether building utility on Bitcoin is part of Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision, Rines argues that Satoshi’s original vision was to create better money with Bitcoin (BTC). He adds that Bitcoin struggles to be the best form of money due to scalability challenges that layer-2 networks could fix.
These new networks create an alternative world where the Bitcoin base layer is left untouched to safeguard the billions of dollars on the network, while layer-2s allow for some experimentation and new financial systems in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Rines believes there is some merit to existing layer-1 networks like Ethereum and Solana and the DeFi ecosystems built on them. However, he thinks the landscape could change, and users may gravitate toward other ecosystems like layer-2s built on…
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