SmartCon 2024 featured presentations from more than 100 blockchain industry pioneers and financial leaders, who gathered to highlight the convergence of TradFi and DeFi into a more efficient global financial system. To delve deeper into the most groundbreaking topics from this year’s event, Nasdaq TradeTalks host Jill Malandrino interviewed some of the most influential speakers on-site at Hong Kong’s Kerry Hotel.
Alisia Painter is the co-founder and COO of Botanix Labs, whose Spiderchain is the first fully decentralized EVM-equivalent layer-2 network on Bitcoin. She sat down with Malandrino to discuss key use cases being built on the world’s largest and oldest cryptocurrency.
Botanix Labs was founded in 2022 to develop technologies that enable secure DeFi on Bitcoin (BTCFi). Using proof of stake, Spiderchain expands Bitcoin’s utility beyond buying, selling, and holding by bringing the strengths of Ethereum and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to Bitcoin’s ecosystem.
“EVM is the winning virtual machine that has the most number of dApps, the most tooling, the most ecosystem,” Painter said. “So we thought, ‘Why don’t we bring that over to Bitcoin?’”
She explained how Spiderchain expands the DeFi experience on Bitcoin.
“Once you onboard your Bitcoin onto Botanix, you can interact with DEXs, stablecoins, perpetual DEXs, open long and short positions, mint stablecoins, staking – all of this you can now bring on Bitcoin and it opens up so many more yield opportunities.”
In October, Botanix Labs joined Chainlink Scale to accelerate the development of feature-rich dApps that advance BTCFi. As part of Scale, Spiderchain is integrating Chainlink Data Feeds and Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) as its canonical cross-chain infrastructure for facilitating Programmable Token Transfers with the highest level of cross-chain security.
Painter highlighted the realm of opportunities for Bitcoin on Botanix.
“We have 100 different dApps being built on us. The majority of them are for the DeFi use case, but what’s also really interesting is social applications on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not only the most decentralized, it’s also censorship-resistant, and that is a really interesting property that no other cryptocurrency can claim.”
She believes Bitcoin’s unique resistance to the conditions and circumstances of local political economies can be harnessed to democratize participation in high-performing asset classes like private equity or stock markets, ultimately driving cryptocurrency adoption around the world.
“That is the type of inclusion that Bitcoin and that crypto can theoretically provide,” she said.
Watch Jill Malandrino’s full interview with Alisia Painter.