Bitcoin L2s Are Getting Serious

Bitcoin L2s went from meme to legitimate faster than anyone expected. A year ago it was all vaporware and promises. Now there's real infrastructure shipping.

BitVM was the catalyst. Proving arbitrary computation on Bitcoin without changing the base layer sounded impossible. Turns out careful use of existing opcodes gets you surprisingly far. Not elegant but functional.

The design space is completely different from Ethereum L2s. No smart contracts to hook into. No account model to leverage. Everything has to work with UTXOs and limited scripting. The constraints breed creativity.

The Bitcoin rollup UX is rough but improving. Deposit and withdrawal flows are clunky. Confirmation times vary wildly. But you can actually use DeFi with BTC as the native asset now.

The security models vary dramatically between projects. Some inherit Bitcoin's security properly. Others make tradeoffs that would terrify Ethereum L2 researchers. Due diligence matters more than ever.

What excites me is the capital unlock potential. Trillions in BTC sitting idle. Even a small percentage becoming productive changes DeFi dynamics significantly.