Bitlayer is about to issue coin: the scythe of playing people for suckers or the dawn of BTCFi?

Written by: Oliver, Mars Finance

When a star project with dazzling halos like “the first Layer 2 based on BitVM” and “investment from Wall Street giant Franklin Templeton” — Bitlayer, officially announces that its token $BTR is about to undergo TGE, the market sentiment is complex and divided. On one hand, there is anticipation brought by top capital endorsement and grand technological narratives; on the other hand, there is a pervasive fatigue and skepticism in the entire market after experiencing the peak and subsequent fall from the inscription craze, along with countless “meme L2s” left in disarray.

This raises a sharp question that everyone wants to know the answer to: Is Bitlayer issuing tokens at this moment to take advantage of the remaining warmth of the Bitcoin ecosystem to complete a round of exquisite “harvesting,” or does it really have the ability and capital to sound the charge for a new bull market in this seemingly dormant ecosystem?

To answer this question, we must go beyond the superficial noise and delve into its technical core, strategic blueprint, and even the thoughts of its co-founder Kevin He—a serial entrepreneur who has experienced multiple bull and bear markets and has created a hundred billion TVL ecosystem; his vision may provide us with crucial clues.

Bitlayer’s three trump cards - technology, economic model, and execution ability

Bitlayer is not a reckless speculative project; its core competitive advantages consist of three closely interconnected aces: solid technology, a clear economic model, and reliable execution.

Technical Ace: Secure Narrative Based on BitVM Its core lies in the pioneering application of the BitVM paradigm, returning to the essence of security. Co-founder Kevin He pointed out that the essence of BitVM is based on Bitcoin’s optimistic Rollup (Optimistic Rollup), where the brilliance lies in the community consensus gradually shifting from the arduous attempts to build complex virtual machines on Bitcoin to a feasible path of directly verifying zero-knowledge proofs (ZK Proof). This means that challengers only need to verify a deterministic ZK proof on the Bitcoin mainnet to adjudicate fraudulent behavior. This shift greatly reduces the implementation difficulty and brings two fundamental advantages: it can be implemented based on existing technologies such as Taproot without any upgrades to the Bitcoin protocol; at the same time, through on-chain verification, it firmly anchors the security of Layer 2 on top of the Bitcoin mainnet, breaking through the traditional dilemma between security and programmability in scaling solutions. As the first team in the industry to explicitly develop bridges and Layer 2 based on BitVM, Bitlayer has formed strategic partnerships with mainstream mining pools like AntPool and F2Pool, securing nearly 40% of Bitcoin’s hash power support, which ensures that in the event of a fraudulent challenge, the challenged transaction can be prioritized for packaging on-chain—this is a core advantage that is difficult for other teams to reach and is critical for survival.

Economic Model Ace: Carefully Designed $BTR Token Economics This not only reflects its strategic intentions but also provides a clear path for its transition from “market dream rate” to “price-to-earnings ratio.” The total supply of $BTR is fixed at 1 billion tokens, and its allocation strategy clearly focuses on the long-term construction and incentives of the ecosystem.

Massive ecological incentives: Up to 40% of the tokens are designated for ecological incentives. This is a huge “war fund,” indicating that Bitlayer plans to invest substantial resources to guide and nurture its ecosystem to attract developers and users in the highly competitive L2 market.

Clear token utility: $BTR is endowed with multiple core functions, including staking to maintain network security, participating in on-chain governance to decide the protocol’s future, and a crucial fee switch mechanism. This mechanism could allocate a portion of the protocol’s revenue in the future to reward stakers or buy back and burn tokens, directly linking the token’s value to network economic activities.

The Ace of Execution: An Experienced Team and Top Capital A grand vision ultimately requires a capable team to realize it. Kevin He’s resume itself is a strong statement of trust: he once led a team to achieve a peak daily trading volume of four million transactions on the HECO ecosystem chain and a TVL surpassing one hundred billion dollars. This mature team, led by him and consisting of nearly sixty members, along with endorsements from top capital firms such as Framework Ventures, ABCDE Capital, and Franklin Templeton, forms a solid foundation for Bitlayer to turn its blueprint into reality.

The Battlefield Under the Grand Narrative - The Real Temperature of the Bitcoin Ecosystem

Bitlayer’s ambitions need to be tested in a real battlefield. This battlefield—the Bitcoin ecosystem—is currently in a “sober time” after a frenzy, but far from being silent. It presents a complex, multi-layered picture where ice and fire coexist.

As Kevin He has observed, there is a significant temperature difference in the perception of the ecological status between Eastern and Western markets. The Chinese community feels generally pessimistic after the tide receded, due to their overly high expectations for the early inscription craze; whereas the European and American markets remain quite active. He believes that judging BTC’s ecosystem cannot simply apply Ethereum’s standards. The uniqueness of the BTC ecosystem lies in its massive financial activities, such as lending and derivatives trading, which have long existed off-chain. The real opportunity is to safely and efficiently migrate these trillions of dollars of off-chain activities onto the chain. This is the vast sea of BTCFi, and the current bottleneck is the lack of infrastructure.

Although the craze for inscriptions and runes has cooled down, it left behind two valuable legacies as a successful “stress test”: it validated the demand with real money, proving the market’s enormous desire to issue and trade assets on Bitcoin; at the same time, it also exposed bottlenecks, making everyone realize that Layer 2 is essential for ecological development.

Therefore, during the market cooldown period, true builders have not stopped, and an intense “infrastructure race” is quietly unfolding on multiple fronts.

At the protocol layer, innovation continues to deepen. The long-awaited RGB protocol has finally launched on the mainnet after two years, representing a direction for native smart contract exploration. The BRC 2.0 upgrade attempts to integrate EVM compatibility for the massive BRC-20 assets. Furthermore, native protocols like SAT 20, which have been under development for two years, have also finally gone live on the SatoshiNet mainnet.

The competition is equally fierce at the application and infrastructure layers. Various Layer 2 solutions are accelerating delivery. In addition to Bitlayer, the Bitcoin bridge Fiamma, built on BitVM 2, has also launched on the mainnet, joining the competition for trust-minimized cross-chain solutions. Meanwhile, native L2s like Spark, which focus on payments and settlements, are also making continuous progress.

In terms of assets and markets, the ecosystem has not completely frozen. The long-established Bitcoin NFT series led by “NodeMonkes” has shown strong signs of recovery recently. In the runes sector, although the leading $DOG has performed mediocrely, several runes have excelled over a longer time frame, and the successful listing of $DOG on mainstream exchanges like Kraken marks a gradual recognition of rune assets.

In summary, the current Bitcoin ecosystem is not dead but has entered a stage of sifting through the false and retaining the true, focusing on internal strength. Bitlayer has entered the arena with its unique technological approach and strong capital in this competitive era of builders.

Is it reaping or dawn? The answer lies in the details of execution.

Now, we can more clearly answer the initial question. Is Bitlayer here to “harvest”? This risk is real. BitVM is a cutting-edge and extremely complex technology that faces significant technical execution risks. At the same time, in the context where competitors like Merlin Chain have captured huge TVL through aggressive airdrops, market competition is exceptionally fierce.

However, the possibility of Bitlayer becoming the “new hope” is becoming increasingly clear. This hope is no longer based on a vague dream, but is built on a series of solid pillars:

Clear roadmap: It has a clear plan from market validation to secure implementation and then to building a high-frequency trading environment.

Pragmatic business model: It chooses to start from the essential needs of service agencies and users, rather than creating demand out of thin air.

Reliable leadership: It is steered by a seasoned leader, ensuring the execution power of the project.

The security philosophy that aligns with the spirit of Bitcoin: Its ultimate pursuit of minimal trust is most likely to earn the final trust of the Bitcoin core community and long-term holders.

The issuance of $BTR is not the end of the story, but the starting gun. The massive 40% ecological incentive fund will be the fuel for Bitlayer to realize its three-phase roadmap. The ultimate answer does not lie in the price of the coin at the moment of TGE, but in whether Bitlayer can steadily deliver on its technological commitments and effectively utilize this “war fund” to cultivate a truly prosperous ecosystem that can migrate off-chain value to the Bitcoin chain.

For us observers, Bitlayer’s journey will be the best sample to measure whether the Bitcoin ecosystem can make the thrilling leap from “digital gold” to “programmable financial infrastructure.”