introduction
Benefiting from the popularity of Ordinals and the wealth-creating effect of inscriptions, the market has paid more attention to the BTC ecosystem. It is found that information can be stored through the Taproot protocol and packaged on the chain as traceability credentials, which means that BCT Chain can store information and build DApps.
With the BTC ecosystem completely entering the public eye, the upgrade based on Taproot has completely laid the basic technology for developers to build smart contracts on BTC. This article will combine the development background and current situation of BTC technology to conduct an in-depth analysis of the ecology and potential projects currently being developed by BTC.
1. Overview of the track
1.1 Definitions and Background
Developers have been trying to build smart contracts on BTC because of BTC's strong consensus and high market cap, which makes it theoretically more secure, so:
- In March 2023, Ordinals came out of thin air, defining a set of ordinal protocols that run on the BTC network, enabling tokens and NFTs to be implemented and run stably on the BTC network.
- In addition, developers derive the Inscriptions protocol through Ordinals, which allows any content (such as text, images, videos, html and other format files) to be attached to a single satoshi, and the inscription is completed by sending a transaction of taproot script to achieve on-chain packaging.
In this way, the information can be stored through the Taproot protocol, and then packaged on the chain as a traceability certificate, making BTC a public chain that can store information, so that DApps can be built according to the taproot protocol, and the BTC ecology has completely entered the public eye.
Each BTC is broken down into 100 million satosos, and Ordinals is a system that numbers each one. At the same time, Satoshi shifts from trade input to trade output according to the first-in, first-out principle. Both numbering schemes and transfer (transaction) schemes rely on order, with numbering schemes relying on the order in which satoshis is mined, and transfer schemes relying on the order in which transactions are input and output.
1.2 Development History
Dyed coins
In 2013, someone proposed the concept of "Colored Coin" in the BTC community, allowing people to dye small amounts of BTC, that is, using the characteristics of the BTC blockchain to define the empty fields of BTC into a data format to represent other assets they hold, so that the BTC blockchain can not only support BTC transactions, but also support other wider applications.
However, the essence of dyeing is a protocol that needs to be supported by the client, and if a client does not support the protocol, it will not be able to recognize that the data in the UTXO represents the dyed coin. (Bitcoin-Core, as the largest client, does not endorse the protocol, so dyed coins have been adopted on a small scale.) ）
Dyeing refers to adding specific information to the UTXOs of BTC so that different UTXOs can be distinguished, so that homogeneous BTC can be distinguished from each other.
Dyed coins refer to a set of similar technologies that use the BTC system to record the creation, ownership, and transfer of assets other than BTC, which can be used to track digital assets as well as tangible assets held by third parties, and to trade ownership through dyed coins.
OP_RETURN
In March 2014, Bitcoin Core 0.9.0 was released, incorporating OP_Retrun output as a type of standard transaction, which was forwarded by nodes but the update notes stated:
This change is not to encourage the storage of data in the blockchain. This OP_Retrun change creates a provably prunable output to avoid the never-expendable output being used to store arbitrary data (such as images) — some of which are already deployed — which can lead to bloat of BTC's UTXO database. It's still a terrible idea to store arbitrary data on the blockchain, and it's cheaper and more efficient to store non-currency-related data somewhere else.
Source: https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.9.0#opreturn-and-data-in-the-block-chain
This is a compromise made by the BTC Core team to deal with the contamination caused by BTC, in order to prevent the type of protocol of dyed coins, which stores irrelevant data on UTXOs, so nodes can now forward it.
Lightning Network
The Lightning Network was first proposed in February 2015 in the paper "The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments" and launched in 2018 with the aim of solving the performance problems of the transaction network.
The Lightning Network puts a large number of transactions outside the BTC blockchain, and only puts the key links on the chain for confirmation. The general principle is that after the two parties to the transaction establish an off-chain payment channel, and then finally exit the payment channel, the final result of the transaction is submitted to the mainnet at one time. It allows users to make a large number of transactions outside of the main blockchain and then record those transactions as a single transaction. However, the TPS that the Lightning Network can bring to BTC is still limited, and it is still not suitable for building smart contracts.
In addition, users are trading off-chain, and the final result will be uploaded to the chain after closing the channel, so the security of the Lightning Network transaction process is not guaranteed, and large-scale funds still dare not easily use the Lightning Network, and still have to transfer through the mainnet.
Taproot
Launched in November 2021, the Taproot upgrade is one of the most significant upgrades performed in the last few years and aims to enhance the privacy, scalability, and utility of the first-generation blockchain network.
After the upgrade, Taproot supports batch verification of multiple signatures and transactions, which fundamentally solves the problem of slow transaction verification speed before, greatly reducing the need for block space and speeding up operations. This also reduces the resource intensity of smart contracts, making them more practical and accessible for everyday transactions, and this versatility opens up new possibilities for unique digital assets and other advanced features on the BTC network.
Most of the smart contract construction is now based on the Taproot protocol. However, Tproot also has its own problems, including data storage off-chain, the need for a wallet that supports Taproot format, the data is mainly stored in the third-party index, if the user or the third party loses the data, then the token will be lost.
The above is the adoption of Taproot, and we can see that the adoption rate of Taproot has been increasing since its launch. Ordinals was launched in November 2022, and since its launch, its usage has exploded. As of December 25, 2023, 75 out of an average of 100 transactions are related to Taproot.
1.3 Competitive Landscape
As a public chain, it is currently divided into asset issuance, that is, BRC-20 tokens or inscription tokens, and diversified smart contracts. In essence, it is still an ecological competition between public chains, and there is no very obvious competition yet, because it is a relatively new track, and various ecosystems such as Layer2, DeFi, Gamefi, and cross-chain bridges are in the initial stage of development.
The key point of competition is still who can be the first to land Layer 2 to support smart contracts (BTC main chain cannot support smart contracts), and the current heat is mainly focused on simple inscriptions and the infrastructure to support smart contracts.
BTC Layer1 is issued in two genres: the Json genre and the Atomicals exclusive UTXO genre.
BRC20 and sidechain scaling
Brc20 is an on-chain record-keeping, off-chain processing token system that uses BTC as storage, and this type of scaling can be achieved by adding more business logic to the off-chain indexing server. For example, new primitives in addition to "mint", "deploy", and "transfer" are directly introduced under the "op" field of JSON to perform operations such as placing orders, staking, burning, and authorizing, and the combination of these "ops" can further evolve Inscription-Fi (Inscription Finance) such as swap and lending, and even more complex socialfi and gamefi.
This is essentially indexer-oriented programming, which is more like web2 programming a server interface, which is less difficult to implement, and can even start directly from an index server, but the results are very significant. At present, unisat's swap and other features, including brc100, orc20, and TAP protocols, are the pioneers of this type of JSON scaling genre, and have the opportunity to bring about changes quickly.
However, decentralization is always a concern, indexer-oriented programming will inevitably lead to increasing pressure on servers, making it more difficult for communities to run, and complex businesses must also require consensus consistency, which will eventually lead to the development of smart contract platforms.
The 2012 U.S.
Atomicals' Arc20 token is represented directly by BTC's UXTO itself, without the presence of Json updates. Directly based on UXTO, the operation allows Arc20 tokens to achieve many interesting capabilities, such as enabling Arc20 tokens to swap BTC, and consuming Arc20 tokens to produce another Arc20 token.
By controlling transaction inputs/outputs, Arc20 can implement simple DeFi functionality (which makes developers more demanding and difficult), and its benefits are clear: all logic is handled directly by the BTC network, sharing maximum security and consensus, while seamlessly sucking in BTC assets without relying on third-party BTC bridges like sidechains.
Arc20 itself is not Turing-complete, therefore, after absorbing the design ideas of Bitvm, the Atomicals protocol also proposes Avm's BTC Layer 2 scheme, which is a Layer 2 that submits proof in Layer 1 of the BTC network and is verified by the BTC script circuit logic. Arc20, as an asset represented by UTXOs, is a natural fit to be used as collateral for fraud proofs at the second level of the AVM. This may be the most suitable Layer 2 solution for BTC.
Atomicals' developer @wizzwallet gave some information about the AVM in a recent update, and maybe it's progressing faster than expected.
2. Track ecology
2.1 Layer2 生态
Stacks
Stacks project started in 2017, Stacks is a Layer2 public chain project dedicated to building BTC upper-layer applications, mainly connected to BTC through the POX (Proof of transfer) consensus mechanism, with the goal of building a large-scale ecosystem on the basis of BTC.
There are currently about 60 DApps on the Stacks website. In Stacks, after miners lock up BTC, the network chooses the leader of each round, and the leader of each round is responsible for the block packaging of Stacks, and then the leader sends the hash value to the mainnet to receive smart contracts and transaction fee rewards. In other words, the node is not only responsible for the node of the BTC mainnet, but also participates in the node verification of the Stacks network, and has two opportunities to receive packaging rewards.
At present, the overall data situation of Stacks is not available through public channels, and the overall ecological development is not satisfactory.
At present, Stacks' TVL is mainly focused on ALEX, as a one-stop DeFi protocol on Stacks, its TVL reached $45 million, with a market capitalization of about $245 million.
Judging from the data: ALEX's market capitalization rose late, and for the leading infrastructure agreement, it may lag behind the overall market, and the foldout shows that the speed of capital flow in the industry is still slow.
Rootstock
Rootstock is a BTC-based, EVM-compatible smart contract platform that aims to extend its functionality, implement smart contracts, and enable permissionless construction of DeFi protocols without compromising the BTC core layer. The Rootstock Infrastructure Framework (RIF Architecture) is suitable for scenarios such as payment and identity verification.
Rootstock has developed better, and its TVL is far superior to Stacks, mainly because DApps on Stacks need to be built using the new language Clarity, but Rootstock is EVM compatible and more developer-friendly.
At present, the main projects in this ecosystem are MoneyOnChain and Sovryn, which are one-stop DeFi platforms and Lending platforms, respectively. Sovryn has been coined and has a market capitalization of $25 million.
Liquid Network
Liquid works similarly to the Lightning Network, where BTC on the network is verifiably backed by BTC on the main chain on a 1:1 basis. Once users transfer their BTC to Liquid, they can take advantage of the network's speed and secrecy when making transactions. Users can also issue new assets on the network, such as stablecoins and security tokens.
At present, there are two officially recommended applications, namely Hodl Hodl P2P lending protocol and Side Swap. Although P2P lending can optimize capital efficiency, the liquidity is very poor (at present, mainstream lending protocols have become in the form of peer-to-pool, which can better match supply and demand).
2.2 NFT Ecosystem
Benefiting from the market popularity of Ordinals, funds began to gradually pour into the NFT ecosystem. The current NFT market with high liquidity is Magic Eden, which launched BTC's NFT marketplace in March 2023 and currently accounts for about 70% of the market's liquidity.
Bitcoin Frogs
On Magic Eden's NFT marketplace, the highest volume is Bitcoin Frogs. A pure PFP with a total amount of 10,000 pieces, a floor price of 0.3 BTC, and a trading volume of about 950 BTC.
Judging from the data: with the gradual decline in the popularity of the BTC track, the price of Ordinals has decreased, and the trend of the NFT market has also declined.
Bitmap
Bitmap is a set of open-source standard protocols proposed by blockamoto on June 13, 2023 based on ordinals, with the purpose of establishing a metaverse land consensus on the BTC chain.
The project is relatively new, unlike Decentralized, The sandbox, etc., this type of land, can build countless similar projects, but if the block is bound to a bitmap, then scarcity is naturally formed, rather than the project party itself. The scarcity of a bitmap comes from the ordinal number of the block to which it belongs. At present, most of Bitmap's projects are still in the exploration and development stage.
Bitmap is actually a set of standards for defining the ownership of each block of BTC, and the indexer or platform can visually map the block data into different 3D spaces according to the rules, becoming a piece of land in the metaverse. For example, according to Blockamoto's proposal, the value data contained in the block is defined as the land surface area, vbytes = land depth, etc. Because each block contains different data (block number, transaction amount, transaction quantity), it will eventually be generated into land with different attributes.
In fact, the BTC original chain itself does not have the concept of allowing someone to have the ownership of this block, and Bitmap defines block ownership for Bitmap holders in its own ecosystem, which is also the core of bitmap. On the basis of this immutable core, indexers or Bitmap-based project owners can have their own rules for interpreting block data, mapping different metaverse scenarios, and developing different functions for Bitmap holders.
Ordinal Maxi Biz
The Ordinals protocol is a method of writing data to various Satoshi on the BTC network, initially used to mint images as NFTs, after which developers use text-based inscriptions to create tokens, similar to how they are minted through the ERC-20 token standard on the Ethereum network. And Ordinal Maxi Biz entered the public eye with Ordinals and the concept of rare satoshis in this round of NFT.
It utilizes ordinal inscriptions of JSON data to deploy, mint, and transfer tokens. This innovation satisfies the need for fungible tokens on the BTC network, which was previously lacking but also has its limitations. This is where developers build protocols on top of ordinal numbers to further improve their infrastructure.
BRC-20 is an experimental fungible token standard that uses ordinal inscriptions on the BTC network, but unlike ERC-20, BRC-20 tokens do not use smart contracts.
There is a block 9 satoshis that is the oldest satoshi in circulation, and block 9 is very popular due to its historical and cultural significance. Some of the popular series inscribed on Satoshi Chunk 9 include Ordinal Maxi Biz (OMB), Green Eyes, and Timechain Collectibles Series 2.
2.3 DeFi Ecosystem
With the Ordinals craze, many developers have started building multiple DeFi protocols on BTC:
Bounce Finance
Bounce is a decentralized auction protocol for token swaps, the protocol went live in July 2020, and in October 2020, Bounce was selected as the second batch of seed funding projects on Binance Smart Chain and is also considered a sub-project of Binance.
Bounce由Ankr的创始人Chandler Song创建,投资方包括ParaFi Capital、Blockchain Capital等机构,𱓲及Synthetix的创始人Kain Warwick和Aave的创始人Stani Kulechov等行业人士。
The auction protocol has launched the recently popular cross-chain protocol Multibit and the lending protocol Bitstable. The groundbreaking Multibit protocol aims to unify liquidity between the BTC network and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) network. Its core product is the Multibit Bridge, which is used to seamlessly transfer tokens between ETH Chain, BNB Chain, and BTC networks. This bridging mechanism not only enhances the liquidity of the BRC-20 token, but also facilitates the growth and development of the entire BTC ecosystem.
The price of Multibit was 0.000516U each at the time of the auction, and the price was 0.2407 as of December 25, an increase of 466 times, and the current market value is $230 million.
BitStable
BitStable is a decentralized asset protocol based on the BTC network. Anyone can generate $DAII stablecoins for collateralized assets in the BTC ecosystem through this platform anywhere. BitStable has a dual-token system and a cross-chain compatible structure, with its tokens being $DAII and $BSSB. $DAII is a stablecoin (BRC 20) whose value and stability derives from the robustness of the assets of the BTC ecosystem, including BRC 20, RSK, and the Lightning Network, among others. In addition, in BitStables' vision, $DAII can also bring the Ethereum community into the BTC ecosystem with its cross-chain capabilities. The total supply of $DAII is 1 billion. $BSSB is the governance token of the platform that is used by the community to maintain the system and manage the $DAII. BitStable will also incentivize $BSSB holders through dividends and other measures.
The total supply of $BSSB is 21 million, of which, in addition to the 50% public sale on Bounce Finance, the team will hold 5% of the $BSSB (locked for 6 months, linear vesting for 15 months), the airdrop quota will account for 3.5%, the staking rewards will account for 36.5%, and LP will account for 5% (locked indefinitely).
Bitstable's price at the time of the auction was 0.0546U, and as of December 25, 2023, the price is $5.52, an increase of more than 100 times, and the current market capitalization is $65 million.
According to DeFillama, the current TVL has risen to $83 million.
3.4 Stamp 生态
Stamp is a track ecosystem that has not yet received widespread attention, but there are already projects in this area, so here is a brief introduction:
Stamp encodes the binary content of the image into a Base64 string and embeds the Base64 format data with the transaction output, thus achieving permanent data preservation, which allows the NFT to be truly stored on the blockchain.
This design has its advantages and disadvantages compared to Ordinals: Stamps' UTXO method makes them untrimmed and therefore appear to be permanent, even though they are more expensive to manufacture than Ordinals minting, and Ordinals use witness data to eventually make them prunable, which is cheaper to manufacture than Stamps.
In the NFT world, it's often a misnomer to use "art stored on the blockchain" as a way to achieve permanence. Most NFTs simply point to centrally hosted image pointers or are stored in on-chain prunable witness data.
The current Stamp marketplace is Open Stamp, RareStamp, Stampscan, and StampedNinja.
3. Future prospects
3.1 Phase progress (status quo)
From a technical point of view: the current BTC track is in a very early stage, taking the expansion layer Stacks as an example, it is a relatively early Layer 2 solution, which was launched in January 2021, but its ecological development is not satisfactory.
From DeFillama, we can see that the largest DEX ALEX daily trading volume is only $4.7 million, compared to Uniswap's $1.96 billion per day and Pancakeswap $600 million per day, which is a huge gap.
Remarks of the investment institution for the amount of project financing
Tonka Finance$ 2.5 M — A Bitcoin Inscription Lending Platform, BRC20.COM$1.5 MUTXO Management*, One Block Capital, Sora Ventures, Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Owl Ventures A Bitcoin-based DeFi protocol that integrates mobile wallets, cross-chain bridges, multi-minting, marketplaces, staking, and more. BitSmiley — ABCDE Capital*, MakerDAO+Compound for the Bixin Ventures Bitcoin ecosystem, Unisat — LK Venture, a browser extension wallet that allows users to securely and easily store, send, and receive Bitcoin and Ordinals on the Bitcoin blockchain, Saturn$ 0.5 MBig brain Holdings*, UTXO DIBA — Waterdrip Capital, Draper Associates A Bitcoin NFT marketplace that allows users to trade any asset issued by a Bitcoin smart contract on a Layer 2 network (e.g., the Lightning Network). Taproot Wizards$7.5MStandard Crypto*, Geometry, Collider Ventures, Starkware A Bitcoin-focused Ordinals project inspired by the original Bitcoin wizard Reddit meme from a decade ago. DLC.Link$2MABCDE Capital*, Bixin Ventures, Comma3 Ventures, Waterdrip Capital DLC.Link are building infrastructure to enable smart contract settlement of native Bitcoin, Xverse$5MJump Crypto*, RockawayX A Bitcoin wallet that provides access to Ordinals, NFTs, DeFi and decentralized applications, BTCDomain — Waterdrip Capital* a Bitcoin domain name service platform where users can register a name and associate it with their Bitcoin address, Fedi$17MEgo Death CapitalFedi is developing a Fedi mobile app based on the Bitcoin custody protocol Fedimint, LayerTwo Labs$3M — A secondary blockchain that interacts with the main blockchain and is designed to provide a better user experience (UX); Finterest$1.5MPolychain, 9Yards Capital, a native bitcoin lending platform that operates in a trustless manner on Internet Computer, Sovryn$5.4MGeneral Catalyst, Collider VenturesSovryn, a Bitcoin-based decentralized trading and lending platform developed on RSK;
From the perspective of project investment and financing: the BTC track has just experienced the initial outbreak stage, but the number of investments is relatively small, and the investment amount is low, and the world's first-line VCs have not yet been deeply involved (this inscription boom is also mainly China's regional capital and users).
3.2 Advantages & Potential
BTC's iconic position in the industry and the consensus of the brand are the biggest advantages of the BTC track, and in recent months, the appearance of the inscription-driven ecology and the value derived from it fully reflect its huge potential.
Consensus advantage: Institutional BTC holders and non-crypto-native retail investors will be incremental contributors to market liquidity, but with low risk appetite and tolerance for complexity. The simplicity of BTC products allows users to make their products more "capital efficient" and generate sustainable and reliable returns without complex operations and counterparty risk.
Solution advantages: UTXO's explicit dependencies and relational tracking allow it to run in parallel, which allows smaller, more manageable computations to run in parallel compared to the sequential execution of the ETH account model, which is more suitable for running ZKP. (See Zorp, a zkVM that uses the UTXO model to achieve high ZKP performance)
Layer 2 potential: Brc20 has created a new type of asset that is completely different from FT and NFT, and developers have joined and launched many excellent protocols, allowing inscriptions to spill over to more chains. Inscription L2 can effectively lower the barrier to entry for users, reach a compromise with BTC conservatives, and most importantly, the full smart contract capability will also introduce more gameplay for Inscription, which will further unleash the potential of the BTC track.
Industry inevitability: With the continuous iterative optimization of each track, the entire industry is also developing rapidly, BTC, as the aggregate of the highest consensus, even if it is slightly lagging behind, will inevitably gradually follow and connect with the application projects of each track or even bundle, with the market increment brought by the landing of ETFs, the market consensus of BTC will be further strengthened, and this trend will become inevitable.
Therefore, even if the builders know that BTC has no advantage in building smart contracts, they will never give up, and the imagination of the BTC track is directly proportional to its degree of consensus.
3.3 Problems & Difficulties
Insufficient throughput: OP_RETURN opcode allows us to store up to 40 bytes of arbitrary data in Bitcoin transactions. In comparison, EIP4844 upgrade can bring 0.375MB of storage space to Layer 2, which is about ten times that of BTC OP_CODE. Even so, subsequent Danksharding upgrades are still required, and the latest ZK-SNRKS technology is supported.
Non-Turing-complete limitations: BTC smart contracts are implemented using a non-Turing-complete scripting language (Script), which is designed to maximize the security of the network by limiting the attack surface (e.g., there are no re-entrancy attacks with a scripting language), which makes it impossible to implement application functions through flexible programming like ETH, and BTC's Layer 1 is not like Ethereum that supports contract verification and cannot perform Layer 1 level forced exit withdrawals.
Scaling issues: It is too difficult and time-consuming to directly develop BTC-based layer 2 scaling solutions (such as Bitvm), which will inevitably make builders give priority to introducing new sidechains in a cross-chain manner. However, we know that these Layer2 sidechains are likely to have potential problems such as centralization or security, and cannot be used as rollups similar to the ETH architecture.
Single narrative: In addition to fair distribution and meme, the BTC track also lacks a narrative that can support market value, which is also an important reason why VC enters less, and requires builders to return to rationality, carry out continuous investment and more down-to-earth construction, and precipitate and accumulate their own narrative capabilities in development, so as to break through their own shackles.
3.4 Trend Forecasting
HOWEVER, THE DEVELOPERS IN THE BTC ECOSYSTEM ARE DIVIDED INTO TWO FACTIONS, ONE IS CONSERVATIVE, MAINLY THE DEVELOPERS OF THE BTC-CORE CLIENT, AND THE OTHER IS THE RADICAL GROUP, WHO WANT TO INTRODUCE SMART CONTRACTS TO THE BTC ECOSYSTEM, AND THE CONSERVATIVES MAY BECOME A HINDRANCE TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THIS APPLICATION. As far as BTC Layer 2 is concerned, it must be presented in the form of a sidechain at this stage, and its security and decentralization cannot be done very well.
In the short and medium term, with the landing of ETFs and the arrival of a new round of market cycle, the popularity of the BTC track will still be maintained, and it is very likely that new breakthroughs will occur, which will further promote the maturity of the BTC track.
In the long run, the potential of the BTC track has not yet been released, and if more VCs can enter and the differences among technology developers do not hinder the progress of ecological development, then the construction of BTC infrastructure will inevitably be gradually promoted to the ground, and there will be a new round of outbreak once the time is ripe.
4. Summary
Looking at the value narrative of BTC from a higher perspective: After more than a decade of development, BTC's value store function has been widely recognized, and macroeconomic factors such as regulatory policies, ETFs, and interest rate cuts have had a significant impact on its market performance, indicating that BTC has become one of the targets of asset allocation for more traditional institutions.
The Ordinals boom has brought about a full recovery of the BTC ecosystem, but in essence, the current BTC is still following the old path of Ethereum smart contracts, and the big factor is the speculation-driven hype. However, this wave of craze also attracted a large number of builders to participate, laying the initial foundation for the development of the BTC track, and driving the BTC track to break the original shackles and begin to keep up with the trend of the entire industry.
As the social attributes of BTC's store of value become more widely recognized, its derivative financial products and innovations will become more and more abundant, although Layer 2 will still eventually face the problem of scaling, and it may be more likely that it will need to go through the path of ETH again, and even the mechanism problem based on UTXO will be more difficult, but as long as you follow and wait for the opportunity, the forerunner will give BTC more direction.
In addition, for the BTC track, social attributes are as important as technical attributes, and in the process of moving towards a universal currency, its social attributes will become stronger and stronger. It is precisely because of this that the improvement and development of the BTC track has become an inevitability of the industry and the inevitability of society.
A few other suggested items to focus on:
Babylon: a bridgeless and trust-minimized BTC staking platform where users can earn yield with tokens on the PoS chain of their choice;
Papaya: A platform that enables BTC staking using the underlying infrastructure of STX and sBTC;
Atomic Finance: Leverage DLC to allow users to earn self-custody benefits in Bitcoin;
ACRE: Another "BTC Lido" that uses the Threshold network sidechain;
eBTC: A BTC-backed stablecoin developed by the founding team of BadgerDAO on the EVM;