From Polkadot to Polygon, the entrepreneurial journey of industry veteran Charlie Hu spans key cycles in the development of blockchain infrastructure over the past decade. As an early participant in the Polkadot ecosystem and a pioneer in the Asia-Pacific region for Polygon, he not only accumulated deep technical and ecological experience but also keenly captured the explosive opportunity of the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2023. Based on his in-depth understanding and engineering practice of BitVM technology, he co-founded Bitlayer with tech enthusiast Kevin He, a Layer 2 solution that realizes the scalability and programmability of Bitcoin, aiming to become the true "computation layer" of the Bitcoin network.
Since the mainnet launch in the first quarter of 2024, Bitlayer has quickly grown to become a leader in the Bitcoin Layer 2 space: on-chain transaction volume has exceeded 71 million, with a peak TVL of nearly $900 million, and it has repeatedly ranked first in the DefiLlama Bitcoin L2 leaderboard. Its core innovation, a decentralized cross-chain bridge and Rollup architecture built on BitVM, achieves secure and efficient asset cross-chain transfers and smart contract execution without relying on upgrades to the Bitcoin mainnet. Behind this is a team of experienced engineers with technical backgrounds from Polygon, Huobi public chain, Alibaba Super Chain, and Celestia, combining experience in both Eastern and Western markets with strong execution capabilities.
Today (August 27), the Bitcoin native Layer 2 network Bitlayer officially launched the Token Generation Event (TGE) for its governance token BTR, marking the project’s entry into a new phase of openness and ecological expansion. The official announcement indicates that the listing and trading arrangements for BTR have entered the operational stage, and collaborations have begun with multiple platforms for the issuance and trading support.
In recent months, Bitlayer has been very active: it has redefined the Bitcoin Layer 2 infrastructure in the latest released Bitlayer 2.0 white paper and launched the first mainnet Beta of the cross-chain bridge based on the BitVM paradigm. In addition, Bitlayer has established strategic cooperation with three major Bitcoin mining pools—Antpool, F2Pool, and SpiderPool.
Faced with a new cycle dominated by institutional funds, Bitlayer clearly positions itself as "institutional-grade Bitcoin financial infrastructure." Bitlayer has also received funding support from international institutions, having raised a total of $25 million, with supporters including top institutions such as Polychain Capital, Franklin Templeton, ABCDE, StarkWare, OKX Ventures, Alliance DAO, and UTXO Management. This funding and endorsement have also supported its technology development and ecosystem promotion.
In this bull market driven by Wall Street, Bitlayer has set a grand vision, trying to become the key bridge connecting Bitcoin's native assets with the traditional financial world. How is this goal to be achieved? PANews recently conducted an exclusive interview with Bitlayer co-founder Charlie Hu, and the following is the content of the interview:
A Decade of Industry Veterans on the Entrepreneurial Journey: From Polkadot, Polygon to Bitlayer
PANews: What experiences do you have before founding Bitlayer?
Charlie: During my early years studying for a master's degree in finance in the Netherlands, I was always in touch with the technology sector and had a fairly good understanding of early accelerators, technological innovation, especially the Internet of Things. My formal introduction to Bitcoin was completely by chance—in 2013, at a Bitcoin Meetup in Amsterdam, I learned about Bitcoin and mining from the community in a bottom-up way, and I officially began studying the Bitcoin white paper. However, during that time, I did not consider blockchain as a focus for my career development, nor did I include it in my career planning.
In 2015, I attended the Ethereum Devcon in Berlin, Germany, where I learned about Ethereum. At that time, I was very interested in what Gavin Wood was doing, as he was leading the development of Polkadot. I did a lot of community volunteer work with the Polkadot team and participated in the project's first round of investment through German friends.
Polkadot was the first major project I participated in after officially entering the industry. Between 2017 and 2019, I was responsible for simultaneous interpretation and translation at many domestic evangelism events and several events of the Polkadot Eco China Tour. In addition, I co-founded a Polkadot eco brand called "Polkadot base". Based on these experiences, I accumulated a lot of knowledge about Polkadot and the entire Web3 ecosystem construction. At the same time, I also gradually discovered some issues within the Polkadot ecosystem, such as the high cost of slot auctions and other expenses. Therefore, my attention turned back to Ethereum.
In 2021, I joined Polygon and became their official representative for the China region, later becoming the head of the Asia-Pacific region, responsible for project coordination and maintaining developer relations. I was also in charge of BD (Business Development) and partnerships with major clients, such as NetEase, Roblox China, and Tencent, all of which I negotiated collaborations with. Later, as the project team gradually shifted their focus entirely to the United States, along with domestic policy and compliance issues, I left China and also departed from Polygon.
PANews: What prompted you to establish Bitlayer?
Charlie: At the beginning of 2023, concepts like inscriptions and BRC-20 became extremely popular. I was basically one of the earliest participants and made some Bitcoin from it. I also observed the issues with the Bitcoin network: severe congestion and high transaction fees. I realized that this is not a sustainable future.
At that time, many people, including myself, believed that the widespread development of the Bitcoin ecosystem was inevitable. However, to achieve large-scale adoption and even attract institutional participation, DeFi applications needed to be developed. But these could not be realized on the Bitcoin mainnet, so I began researching various solutions to scale Bitcoin.
Later, in October 2023, we saw the BitVM white paper, which proposes a solution that can provide some scalability and verifiability capabilities based on Bitcoin's existing script language without the need for hard forks, soft forks, or upgrades to the Bitcoin mainnet. I found it very interesting and started to study it in depth with Kevin He.
At that time, BTCFi projects like Merlin and Babylon were very popular, and we saw this as an opportunity, so we went all in on the Bitcoin Layer 2 track and formally established Bitlayer. Based on the vision of becoming the "computing layer" and programmable infrastructure for Bitcoin, we launched two core products: BitVM Bridge and Bitcoin Layer 2 Rollup.
Bitlayer Ecosystem and Team Status
PANews: How is the development of the Bitlayer ecosystem now, and what key data can be disclosed?
Charlie: It's been almost 20 months since the launch of Bitlayer at the end of 2023, and a lot has happened in between.
Our first round of financing was relatively early, with investors including OKX Ventures, ABCDE, and Comma3 Ventures, among other Asian capital. At the beginning of 2024, I came into contact with many European and American capital at EthDenver, including Framework Ventures, Alliance DAO, and Asymmetric, all of which later participated in the investment.
The seed round, combined with the white paper release and the mainnet launch, has promoted ecological construction. Since the mainnet went live in April last year, there have been approximately 71 million transactions and over 200 projects deployed, with about 10 active projects currently. The highest TVL approached 900 million USD and is now maintaining at over 700 million USD, still ranking first on Defillama. Additionally, the BitVM cross-chain bridge has completed testing and gone live on the mainnet, and our Bitcoin chain asset YBTC has also been deployed on several leading protocols.
PANews: How is the team size, and how do the two co-founders divide their work?
Charlie: We are a technology-oriented company, with about 60% of our team members engaged in R&D work; the R&D team has about 35 full-time engineers, covering BitVM researchers, front-end and back-end developers, as well as security positions. The team mainly consists of Asian developers, with some colleagues from Europe and America. There are more than ten non-technical positions responsible for operations, business, and media affairs. The overall size of the company is about 50 full-time employees.
In terms of division of labor, I am responsible for business, strategy, and collaboration, including media promotion, developer relations, financing, as well as exchange and liquidity integration, among other things. Besides research and development and products, most other matters fall within my scope of responsibilities. Kevin is responsible for overall product development and technical research, and takes on technical-related decision-making and strategic work.
Why is Bitlayer resilient in the high mortality rate Bitcoin L2 track?
PANews: There are many cases of Bitcoin layer 2 projects failing, stagnating, or transforming. What are the reasons?
Charlie: I believe the main issues in reality are inadequate financing, insufficient team experience, and lack of technical accumulation. Early investors usually do not look at revenue, as it is common for products to be unreleased and have no income. Therefore, they pay more attention to the team's background, understanding of the industry, and whether the technical solution is innovative or differentiated. Timing is also crucial; local resources, operational capabilities after the mainnet launch, the ability to attract or gain support from major investors, and the ability to recruit excellent developers and facilitate institutional collaboration will all directly impact the project's success or failure.
In addition, connections and credibility are equally important. We are able to connect with early partners such as Chainlink, LayerZero, and Nansen, and have established strategic cooperation with Antpool, F2Pool, and SpiderPool. These are resources that many teams do not have. Finally, technology must be innovative; simply copying or outsourcing makes it difficult to survive in the long term. Many projects that claimed to work on BTCFi or BTC L2 at the beginning of last year ultimately shut down, and few have been able to persist.
PANews: What are the differentiated advantages of Bitlayer?
Charlie: BitVM is our core technology strategy and selection. We believe that achieving Bitcoin scaling (especially verification capacity) without relying on mainnet hard forks or soft forks is the only pragmatic path. If we rely on mainnet upgrades, the implementation time will be far away, or it may even be impossible to achieve.
BitVM's design combines the security of Bitcoin with Ethereum-style programmable verification capabilities, allowing verification to be performed in an EVM-like environment, thus unleashing the potential of verification capabilities. Based on this feasibility assessment, we have chosen to fully invest in related research and engineering innovation. Since 2023, we have been one of the earliest core teams in Asia to initiate and continuously promote this direction.
In addition, our development team is also an advantage, consisting of a large number of experienced engineers from major enterprises and blockchain projects, such as the Huobi public chain team, the Alibaba Super Chain team, and engineers with practical experience in areas like Celestia's DA and Aztec's ZK. The team is primarily made up of Asian members, while also including colleagues from Europe and the United States, forming a diverse and competitive research and development lineup.
This has allowed us to have a solid accumulation in research and engineering implementation, with strong execution capabilities and faster landing and response speeds. As a result, we launched our mainnet earlier than some similar teams – we went live with our mainnet last year, while many competitors are still in the testnet phase.
In summary, our technological foresight, background from large enterprises, and high execution capability, combined with practical experience in linking Eastern and Western markets and institutions/communities, give us a clear competitive advantage in technical routes and market implementation. The operational team also has backgrounds from Tencent and ByteDance, and is adept at combining Web2 strategies with Web3 products. The practical experience over the past year has initially validated our strategies and capabilities.
The ambition of technological innovation and business landscape
PANews: How is Bitlayer's commercial layout?
Charlie: One of our core OKRs/KPIs is to expand the business scale and usage volume of YBTC on-chain. YBTC is an upgradeable BTC asset based on BitVM and bridged one-to-one through a decentralized bridge. Our goal is to increase the on-chain scale of YBTC to over 10,000 BTC by the end of the year and to provide ample liquidity in leading blue-chip protocols, allowing more users to recognize and use YBTC—essentially creating a decentralized version of WBTC, while showcasing the BitVM bridge technology and security behind us.
At the ecological level, the upstream liquidity of YBTC can be supplied by various Bitcoin asset providers, while downstream we are responsible for providing infrastructure (such as TPL) for underlying protocols. When the underlying protocols discuss the BTC ecosystem, we are one of their important BitVM partners and also a contributor to TVL. Currently, we have established partnerships with 9 ecosystems and received grant support from the foundation as an investor. With the launch of the Bitlayer v2 mainnet, we will also foster more unique applications—teams are deeply collaborating on prediction markets and options products surrounding Bitcoin assets, as well as high-concurrency trading systems similar to Hyperliquid. Some blue-chip Ethereum protocols such as Morpho and Aave are also advancing deployment on our chain, and the deployment work is proceeding in an orderly manner.
At the institutional level, we are synchronously accelerating the integration of institutional products with large purchase opportunities: against the backdrop of the rise of ETF/ETP, over-the-counter purchases, and institutionalized products, we are promoting ETP solutions and exploring collaboration with Bitcoin reserve companies and other large holders to provide feasible yield paths for their assets. For example, ProCap founder Anthony Pompliano recently became our investor, and I interviewed him in New York. Both parties are jointly exploring cooperation scenarios aimed at providing stable and sustainable yield solutions for their BTC reserves.
PANews: Bitlayer recently released its 2.0 white paper, mentioning many significant technical development plans. Which of these are your team most concerned about and worth looking forward to for users?
Charlie: The BitVM Bridge, built on BitVM technology, has completed testing and auditing. It is officially launched on the mainnet Beta in mid-2025 and is now in the production environment. It has already established connections or collaborations with multiple Layer 1 and Layer 2 chains including Solana, Sui, Base, Arbitrum, Cardano, and Starknet. This bridge employs a fraud-proof and operator challenge mechanism based on Bitcoin scripts, significantly reducing the trust risks associated with centralized multi-signature mappings (such as WBTC). Challenges can be initiated and transactions verified in case of suspected transaction anomalies or hacker attacks.
At the same time, the B2 we are advancing is a Rollup infrastructure with BitVM as the verification kernel, aiming to achieve Bitcoin security equivalence: this solution supports anchoring transaction proofs to Bitcoin blocks, and is currently in the final auditing phase; as one of the core development teams of the BitVM Alliance, we are responsible for the implementation of key modules, code audits, and bug bounty work, and have made original contributions in reducing proof size and optimizing verification costs, having published technical articles on these topics. We have taken a lead role in this module and have driven multiple implementation efforts.
Looking to the future, the vision for V3 is to introduce a parallel/execution architecture with higher throughput while maintaining the equivalent security of Bitcoin, supporting high-frequency, low-latency DeFi and trading protocols, and becoming a high-performance computing layer in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This roadmap is inspired by Alibaba's Super Chain practices, and the team's current chief architect, Daniel, has previously been responsible for related technologies.
In the next 8 to 12 months, we will focus on driving the engineering implementation and deployment of V3. Of course, this technical challenge is significant, and our ambitions are also quite high.
BRT token is about to be launched.
PANews: What specific utilities does BTR have, and how does it empower the ecosystem and users?
Charlie: We are one of the first Bitcoin projects to complete a public offering on CoinList in 2025, which brought us nearly 20,000 participants from regions including Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia. At the same time, we are also the first project to conduct an IDO on the GoMining platform. GoMining is a Bitcoin cloud computing power platform with approximately 3.6 million users, helping us reach a large number of users in Europe and America. We hope to use these channels to introduce more people to BitLayer and help them understand the business scenarios and value of BTCFi.
Regarding the core functions of BTR, we are currently focusing on three main directions. 1. Governance: BTR holders can initiate and participate in network governance votes to decide on proposals related to the network. 2. Node staking: Staking BTR can qualify one to become a node, which will share network transaction fees and bridge-related revenues. 3. Gas: Currently, on-chain gas is temporarily settled using wrapped BTC from the second layer; in the future, BTR may potentially become the network's gas token or participate in fee mechanism design through voting.
The TGE of the BTR token has been preheated through channels such as Binance Alpha and is scheduled to launch on August 27. Mainstream exchanges that have confirmed cooperation include Bitget, Gate, MEXC, and LBank. Coinbase is also in negotiations, but this exchange has pre-listing restrictions, requiring no further fundraising within 6 months prior to listing, so the official listing may be after 6 months. Communication with South Korean exchanges such as Upbit is still ongoing and has not been fully confirmed.
Opportunities and Challenges in an Institution-led Bull Market
PANews: Does the development of BTCFi meet expectations? Compared to the early days of its founding, have your perceptions of Bitlayer's development plan and the entire BTCFi sector changed?
Charlie: Overall, the tangible business related to Bitcoin is smaller and more concentrated than initially expected. The once highly popular inscriptions and BRC-20 have seen a significant decline in consensus and activity, with many projects coming to a standstill—network congestion and high gas fees are among the key reasons. BRC-20 and inscription-type assets are already limited in terms of functionality and actual use cases, which I had predicted at the time.
Another obvious change is that this bull market is led by institutions, rather than being driven by a large number of retail investors as it was in 2021. The new liquidity, capital, and users are more coming from institutions, so Bitcoin DeFi centered around institutions will become a key battleground, and we need to explore and lay out in this direction.
Our core validation point is very clear: to release the liquidity of Bitcoin, allowing Bitcoin assets to find sustainable business scenarios within blue-chip DeFi protocols. The goal is to create long-term value for Bitcoin holders, including retail investors, large holders, and institutions. For example, by introducing Bitcoin into the ecosystem through a decentralized and trustworthy cross-chain bridge, the minted YBTC/YBDC can generate reasonable and sustainable returns, rather than relying on short-term incentives from inflation or subsidies.
Compared to the short-term speculative frenzy around inscriptions at the end of 2023, where there was a massive chase for so-called "hundred-fold coins," the current market is gradually returning to balance on both the supply and demand sides, and the sentiment is more rational.
PANews: What opportunities and challenges does Bitlayer face in this institutional bull market?
Charlie: Institutional inflows have now become a consensus. ETFs and large over-the-counter orders (such as those from institutions like BlackRock) have brought sustained and large-scale buying pressure to the market, driving prices higher in the long term.
This round of the bull market is significantly different from the retail-driven cycle of 2021—the current rise relies more on institutional capital and liquidity. Institutions bring stable large purchases and deep liquidity, and against the backdrop of a gradually easing macro environment (such as potential interest rate cuts) and gradually loosening regulations, more institutionalized products and complex financial engineering will emerge successively, giving us the opportunity to become the infrastructure providers needed for these products.
At the same time, we can explore cooperation with companies that hold a large amount of BTC (similar to companies like MicroStrategy) to create viable income scenarios for their assets.
However, the deep involvement of Wall Street has also brought challenges. The market may be more driven by large institutions and financial engineering, which could lead to manipulation, hedging, and "whale" behavior. This will not only change the market landscape but also shorten the time that startup teams can operate within the market window.
Opportunities are abundant, but they do not necessarily fall into the hands of early-stage tech teams with limited resources. We face the risk of being squeezed in terms of resources and market position.
To this end, we will position ourselves as an institutional-grade infrastructure provider and service provider, focusing on delivering stable, secure, and compliant basic products, including sustainable yield paths, trustworthy cross-chain bridging, and efficient settlement services.
At the same time, we will actively collaborate with mining pools, custodial institutions, asset management companies, and large BTC holders to provide feasible yield solutions and technical support, thereby striving to secure and consolidate our market position amidst the trend of institutionalization.
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Exclusive Interview with Bitlayer Co-founder Charlie: The Bull Run Ambition of Institutional-Level Bitcoin Financial Infrastructure
Editor: Zen, PANews
From Polkadot to Polygon, the entrepreneurial journey of industry veteran Charlie Hu spans key cycles in the development of blockchain infrastructure over the past decade. As an early participant in the Polkadot ecosystem and a pioneer in the Asia-Pacific region for Polygon, he not only accumulated deep technical and ecological experience but also keenly captured the explosive opportunity of the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2023. Based on his in-depth understanding and engineering practice of BitVM technology, he co-founded Bitlayer with tech enthusiast Kevin He, a Layer 2 solution that realizes the scalability and programmability of Bitcoin, aiming to become the true "computation layer" of the Bitcoin network.
Since the mainnet launch in the first quarter of 2024, Bitlayer has quickly grown to become a leader in the Bitcoin Layer 2 space: on-chain transaction volume has exceeded 71 million, with a peak TVL of nearly $900 million, and it has repeatedly ranked first in the DefiLlama Bitcoin L2 leaderboard. Its core innovation, a decentralized cross-chain bridge and Rollup architecture built on BitVM, achieves secure and efficient asset cross-chain transfers and smart contract execution without relying on upgrades to the Bitcoin mainnet. Behind this is a team of experienced engineers with technical backgrounds from Polygon, Huobi public chain, Alibaba Super Chain, and Celestia, combining experience in both Eastern and Western markets with strong execution capabilities.
Today (August 27), the Bitcoin native Layer 2 network Bitlayer officially launched the Token Generation Event (TGE) for its governance token BTR, marking the project’s entry into a new phase of openness and ecological expansion. The official announcement indicates that the listing and trading arrangements for BTR have entered the operational stage, and collaborations have begun with multiple platforms for the issuance and trading support.
In recent months, Bitlayer has been very active: it has redefined the Bitcoin Layer 2 infrastructure in the latest released Bitlayer 2.0 white paper and launched the first mainnet Beta of the cross-chain bridge based on the BitVM paradigm. In addition, Bitlayer has established strategic cooperation with three major Bitcoin mining pools—Antpool, F2Pool, and SpiderPool.
Faced with a new cycle dominated by institutional funds, Bitlayer clearly positions itself as "institutional-grade Bitcoin financial infrastructure." Bitlayer has also received funding support from international institutions, having raised a total of $25 million, with supporters including top institutions such as Polychain Capital, Franklin Templeton, ABCDE, StarkWare, OKX Ventures, Alliance DAO, and UTXO Management. This funding and endorsement have also supported its technology development and ecosystem promotion.
In this bull market driven by Wall Street, Bitlayer has set a grand vision, trying to become the key bridge connecting Bitcoin's native assets with the traditional financial world. How is this goal to be achieved? PANews recently conducted an exclusive interview with Bitlayer co-founder Charlie Hu, and the following is the content of the interview:
A Decade of Industry Veterans on the Entrepreneurial Journey: From Polkadot, Polygon to Bitlayer
PANews: What experiences do you have before founding Bitlayer?
Charlie: During my early years studying for a master's degree in finance in the Netherlands, I was always in touch with the technology sector and had a fairly good understanding of early accelerators, technological innovation, especially the Internet of Things. My formal introduction to Bitcoin was completely by chance—in 2013, at a Bitcoin Meetup in Amsterdam, I learned about Bitcoin and mining from the community in a bottom-up way, and I officially began studying the Bitcoin white paper. However, during that time, I did not consider blockchain as a focus for my career development, nor did I include it in my career planning.
In 2015, I attended the Ethereum Devcon in Berlin, Germany, where I learned about Ethereum. At that time, I was very interested in what Gavin Wood was doing, as he was leading the development of Polkadot. I did a lot of community volunteer work with the Polkadot team and participated in the project's first round of investment through German friends.
Polkadot was the first major project I participated in after officially entering the industry. Between 2017 and 2019, I was responsible for simultaneous interpretation and translation at many domestic evangelism events and several events of the Polkadot Eco China Tour. In addition, I co-founded a Polkadot eco brand called "Polkadot base". Based on these experiences, I accumulated a lot of knowledge about Polkadot and the entire Web3 ecosystem construction. At the same time, I also gradually discovered some issues within the Polkadot ecosystem, such as the high cost of slot auctions and other expenses. Therefore, my attention turned back to Ethereum.
In 2021, I joined Polygon and became their official representative for the China region, later becoming the head of the Asia-Pacific region, responsible for project coordination and maintaining developer relations. I was also in charge of BD (Business Development) and partnerships with major clients, such as NetEase, Roblox China, and Tencent, all of which I negotiated collaborations with. Later, as the project team gradually shifted their focus entirely to the United States, along with domestic policy and compliance issues, I left China and also departed from Polygon.
PANews: What prompted you to establish Bitlayer?
Charlie: At the beginning of 2023, concepts like inscriptions and BRC-20 became extremely popular. I was basically one of the earliest participants and made some Bitcoin from it. I also observed the issues with the Bitcoin network: severe congestion and high transaction fees. I realized that this is not a sustainable future.
At that time, many people, including myself, believed that the widespread development of the Bitcoin ecosystem was inevitable. However, to achieve large-scale adoption and even attract institutional participation, DeFi applications needed to be developed. But these could not be realized on the Bitcoin mainnet, so I began researching various solutions to scale Bitcoin.
Later, in October 2023, we saw the BitVM white paper, which proposes a solution that can provide some scalability and verifiability capabilities based on Bitcoin's existing script language without the need for hard forks, soft forks, or upgrades to the Bitcoin mainnet. I found it very interesting and started to study it in depth with Kevin He.
At that time, BTCFi projects like Merlin and Babylon were very popular, and we saw this as an opportunity, so we went all in on the Bitcoin Layer 2 track and formally established Bitlayer. Based on the vision of becoming the "computing layer" and programmable infrastructure for Bitcoin, we launched two core products: BitVM Bridge and Bitcoin Layer 2 Rollup.
Bitlayer Ecosystem and Team Status
PANews: How is the development of the Bitlayer ecosystem now, and what key data can be disclosed?
Charlie: It's been almost 20 months since the launch of Bitlayer at the end of 2023, and a lot has happened in between.
Our first round of financing was relatively early, with investors including OKX Ventures, ABCDE, and Comma3 Ventures, among other Asian capital. At the beginning of 2024, I came into contact with many European and American capital at EthDenver, including Framework Ventures, Alliance DAO, and Asymmetric, all of which later participated in the investment.
The seed round, combined with the white paper release and the mainnet launch, has promoted ecological construction. Since the mainnet went live in April last year, there have been approximately 71 million transactions and over 200 projects deployed, with about 10 active projects currently. The highest TVL approached 900 million USD and is now maintaining at over 700 million USD, still ranking first on Defillama. Additionally, the BitVM cross-chain bridge has completed testing and gone live on the mainnet, and our Bitcoin chain asset YBTC has also been deployed on several leading protocols.
PANews: How is the team size, and how do the two co-founders divide their work?
Charlie: We are a technology-oriented company, with about 60% of our team members engaged in R&D work; the R&D team has about 35 full-time engineers, covering BitVM researchers, front-end and back-end developers, as well as security positions. The team mainly consists of Asian developers, with some colleagues from Europe and America. There are more than ten non-technical positions responsible for operations, business, and media affairs. The overall size of the company is about 50 full-time employees.
In terms of division of labor, I am responsible for business, strategy, and collaboration, including media promotion, developer relations, financing, as well as exchange and liquidity integration, among other things. Besides research and development and products, most other matters fall within my scope of responsibilities. Kevin is responsible for overall product development and technical research, and takes on technical-related decision-making and strategic work.
Why is Bitlayer resilient in the high mortality rate Bitcoin L2 track?
PANews: There are many cases of Bitcoin layer 2 projects failing, stagnating, or transforming. What are the reasons?
Charlie: I believe the main issues in reality are inadequate financing, insufficient team experience, and lack of technical accumulation. Early investors usually do not look at revenue, as it is common for products to be unreleased and have no income. Therefore, they pay more attention to the team's background, understanding of the industry, and whether the technical solution is innovative or differentiated. Timing is also crucial; local resources, operational capabilities after the mainnet launch, the ability to attract or gain support from major investors, and the ability to recruit excellent developers and facilitate institutional collaboration will all directly impact the project's success or failure.
In addition, connections and credibility are equally important. We are able to connect with early partners such as Chainlink, LayerZero, and Nansen, and have established strategic cooperation with Antpool, F2Pool, and SpiderPool. These are resources that many teams do not have. Finally, technology must be innovative; simply copying or outsourcing makes it difficult to survive in the long term. Many projects that claimed to work on BTCFi or BTC L2 at the beginning of last year ultimately shut down, and few have been able to persist.
PANews: What are the differentiated advantages of Bitlayer?
Charlie: BitVM is our core technology strategy and selection. We believe that achieving Bitcoin scaling (especially verification capacity) without relying on mainnet hard forks or soft forks is the only pragmatic path. If we rely on mainnet upgrades, the implementation time will be far away, or it may even be impossible to achieve.
BitVM's design combines the security of Bitcoin with Ethereum-style programmable verification capabilities, allowing verification to be performed in an EVM-like environment, thus unleashing the potential of verification capabilities. Based on this feasibility assessment, we have chosen to fully invest in related research and engineering innovation. Since 2023, we have been one of the earliest core teams in Asia to initiate and continuously promote this direction.
In addition, our development team is also an advantage, consisting of a large number of experienced engineers from major enterprises and blockchain projects, such as the Huobi public chain team, the Alibaba Super Chain team, and engineers with practical experience in areas like Celestia's DA and Aztec's ZK. The team is primarily made up of Asian members, while also including colleagues from Europe and the United States, forming a diverse and competitive research and development lineup.
This has allowed us to have a solid accumulation in research and engineering implementation, with strong execution capabilities and faster landing and response speeds. As a result, we launched our mainnet earlier than some similar teams – we went live with our mainnet last year, while many competitors are still in the testnet phase.
In summary, our technological foresight, background from large enterprises, and high execution capability, combined with practical experience in linking Eastern and Western markets and institutions/communities, give us a clear competitive advantage in technical routes and market implementation. The operational team also has backgrounds from Tencent and ByteDance, and is adept at combining Web2 strategies with Web3 products. The practical experience over the past year has initially validated our strategies and capabilities.
The ambition of technological innovation and business landscape
PANews: How is Bitlayer's commercial layout?
Charlie: One of our core OKRs/KPIs is to expand the business scale and usage volume of YBTC on-chain. YBTC is an upgradeable BTC asset based on BitVM and bridged one-to-one through a decentralized bridge. Our goal is to increase the on-chain scale of YBTC to over 10,000 BTC by the end of the year and to provide ample liquidity in leading blue-chip protocols, allowing more users to recognize and use YBTC—essentially creating a decentralized version of WBTC, while showcasing the BitVM bridge technology and security behind us.
At the ecological level, the upstream liquidity of YBTC can be supplied by various Bitcoin asset providers, while downstream we are responsible for providing infrastructure (such as TPL) for underlying protocols. When the underlying protocols discuss the BTC ecosystem, we are one of their important BitVM partners and also a contributor to TVL. Currently, we have established partnerships with 9 ecosystems and received grant support from the foundation as an investor. With the launch of the Bitlayer v2 mainnet, we will also foster more unique applications—teams are deeply collaborating on prediction markets and options products surrounding Bitcoin assets, as well as high-concurrency trading systems similar to Hyperliquid. Some blue-chip Ethereum protocols such as Morpho and Aave are also advancing deployment on our chain, and the deployment work is proceeding in an orderly manner.
At the institutional level, we are synchronously accelerating the integration of institutional products with large purchase opportunities: against the backdrop of the rise of ETF/ETP, over-the-counter purchases, and institutionalized products, we are promoting ETP solutions and exploring collaboration with Bitcoin reserve companies and other large holders to provide feasible yield paths for their assets. For example, ProCap founder Anthony Pompliano recently became our investor, and I interviewed him in New York. Both parties are jointly exploring cooperation scenarios aimed at providing stable and sustainable yield solutions for their BTC reserves.
PANews: Bitlayer recently released its 2.0 white paper, mentioning many significant technical development plans. Which of these are your team most concerned about and worth looking forward to for users?
Charlie: The BitVM Bridge, built on BitVM technology, has completed testing and auditing. It is officially launched on the mainnet Beta in mid-2025 and is now in the production environment. It has already established connections or collaborations with multiple Layer 1 and Layer 2 chains including Solana, Sui, Base, Arbitrum, Cardano, and Starknet. This bridge employs a fraud-proof and operator challenge mechanism based on Bitcoin scripts, significantly reducing the trust risks associated with centralized multi-signature mappings (such as WBTC). Challenges can be initiated and transactions verified in case of suspected transaction anomalies or hacker attacks.
At the same time, the B2 we are advancing is a Rollup infrastructure with BitVM as the verification kernel, aiming to achieve Bitcoin security equivalence: this solution supports anchoring transaction proofs to Bitcoin blocks, and is currently in the final auditing phase; as one of the core development teams of the BitVM Alliance, we are responsible for the implementation of key modules, code audits, and bug bounty work, and have made original contributions in reducing proof size and optimizing verification costs, having published technical articles on these topics. We have taken a lead role in this module and have driven multiple implementation efforts.
Looking to the future, the vision for V3 is to introduce a parallel/execution architecture with higher throughput while maintaining the equivalent security of Bitcoin, supporting high-frequency, low-latency DeFi and trading protocols, and becoming a high-performance computing layer in the Bitcoin ecosystem. This roadmap is inspired by Alibaba's Super Chain practices, and the team's current chief architect, Daniel, has previously been responsible for related technologies.
In the next 8 to 12 months, we will focus on driving the engineering implementation and deployment of V3. Of course, this technical challenge is significant, and our ambitions are also quite high.
BRT token is about to be launched.
PANews: What specific utilities does BTR have, and how does it empower the ecosystem and users?
Charlie: We are one of the first Bitcoin projects to complete a public offering on CoinList in 2025, which brought us nearly 20,000 participants from regions including Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Southeast Asia. At the same time, we are also the first project to conduct an IDO on the GoMining platform. GoMining is a Bitcoin cloud computing power platform with approximately 3.6 million users, helping us reach a large number of users in Europe and America. We hope to use these channels to introduce more people to BitLayer and help them understand the business scenarios and value of BTCFi.
Regarding the core functions of BTR, we are currently focusing on three main directions. 1. Governance: BTR holders can initiate and participate in network governance votes to decide on proposals related to the network. 2. Node staking: Staking BTR can qualify one to become a node, which will share network transaction fees and bridge-related revenues. 3. Gas: Currently, on-chain gas is temporarily settled using wrapped BTC from the second layer; in the future, BTR may potentially become the network's gas token or participate in fee mechanism design through voting.
The TGE of the BTR token has been preheated through channels such as Binance Alpha and is scheduled to launch on August 27. Mainstream exchanges that have confirmed cooperation include Bitget, Gate, MEXC, and LBank. Coinbase is also in negotiations, but this exchange has pre-listing restrictions, requiring no further fundraising within 6 months prior to listing, so the official listing may be after 6 months. Communication with South Korean exchanges such as Upbit is still ongoing and has not been fully confirmed.
Opportunities and Challenges in an Institution-led Bull Market
PANews: Does the development of BTCFi meet expectations? Compared to the early days of its founding, have your perceptions of Bitlayer's development plan and the entire BTCFi sector changed?
Charlie: Overall, the tangible business related to Bitcoin is smaller and more concentrated than initially expected. The once highly popular inscriptions and BRC-20 have seen a significant decline in consensus and activity, with many projects coming to a standstill—network congestion and high gas fees are among the key reasons. BRC-20 and inscription-type assets are already limited in terms of functionality and actual use cases, which I had predicted at the time.
Another obvious change is that this bull market is led by institutions, rather than being driven by a large number of retail investors as it was in 2021. The new liquidity, capital, and users are more coming from institutions, so Bitcoin DeFi centered around institutions will become a key battleground, and we need to explore and lay out in this direction.
Our core validation point is very clear: to release the liquidity of Bitcoin, allowing Bitcoin assets to find sustainable business scenarios within blue-chip DeFi protocols. The goal is to create long-term value for Bitcoin holders, including retail investors, large holders, and institutions. For example, by introducing Bitcoin into the ecosystem through a decentralized and trustworthy cross-chain bridge, the minted YBTC/YBDC can generate reasonable and sustainable returns, rather than relying on short-term incentives from inflation or subsidies.
Compared to the short-term speculative frenzy around inscriptions at the end of 2023, where there was a massive chase for so-called "hundred-fold coins," the current market is gradually returning to balance on both the supply and demand sides, and the sentiment is more rational.
PANews: What opportunities and challenges does Bitlayer face in this institutional bull market?
Charlie: Institutional inflows have now become a consensus. ETFs and large over-the-counter orders (such as those from institutions like BlackRock) have brought sustained and large-scale buying pressure to the market, driving prices higher in the long term.
This round of the bull market is significantly different from the retail-driven cycle of 2021—the current rise relies more on institutional capital and liquidity. Institutions bring stable large purchases and deep liquidity, and against the backdrop of a gradually easing macro environment (such as potential interest rate cuts) and gradually loosening regulations, more institutionalized products and complex financial engineering will emerge successively, giving us the opportunity to become the infrastructure providers needed for these products.
At the same time, we can explore cooperation with companies that hold a large amount of BTC (similar to companies like MicroStrategy) to create viable income scenarios for their assets.
However, the deep involvement of Wall Street has also brought challenges. The market may be more driven by large institutions and financial engineering, which could lead to manipulation, hedging, and "whale" behavior. This will not only change the market landscape but also shorten the time that startup teams can operate within the market window.
Opportunities are abundant, but they do not necessarily fall into the hands of early-stage tech teams with limited resources. We face the risk of being squeezed in terms of resources and market position.
To this end, we will position ourselves as an institutional-grade infrastructure provider and service provider, focusing on delivering stable, secure, and compliant basic products, including sustainable yield paths, trustworthy cross-chain bridging, and efficient settlement services.
At the same time, we will actively collaborate with mining pools, custodial institutions, asset management companies, and large BTC holders to provide feasible yield solutions and technical support, thereby striving to secure and consolidate our market position amidst the trend of institutionalization.