Ethereum layer 2 Starknet is laying the groundwork to settle on Bitcoin and Ethereum to unify the two largest blockchains on a single layer.
The Starknet Basis said in its March 11 Bitcoin roadmap that it’s aiming for Starknet to turn out to be Bitcoin’s execution layer, scaling it from 13 transactions per second to 1000’s, lowering blocks and gasoline charges, and creating a greater person expertise.
“Most Bitcoin in the present day sits static in wallets and exchanges, constrained by the limitations of the community’s unique design: a scarcity of scalability and an incapacity to natively help purposes past easy shopping for, promoting, and transferring,” the basis mentioned.
It added that whereas some traders view Bitcoin (BTC) as “digital gold,” it believes “there’s a demand for using Bitcoin for functions past that.”
Supply: Starknet
Beforehand, StarkWare CEO Eli Ben Sasson, the firm behind the STARK proof that contributes to the growth of Starknet, mentioned OP_CAT, a Satoshi-era opcode for unlocking programmability on Bitcoin that was disabled over safety issues, would allow Starknet to settle on the Bitcoin blockchain.
If profitable, Starknet mentioned the transfer would enable builders to construct purposes on the Bitcoin community by means of sensible contracts and allow purposes comparable to staking, borrowing, lending, leveraged buying and selling and yield farming.
As a part of the announcement, StarkWare mentioned it has joined the rising variety of companies in making a Bitcoin reserve, holding a growing portion of its treasury in crypto.
Supply: Ameen Soleimani
Starknet will even staff up with Bitcoin Web3 wallet Xverse, whose founder and CEO Ken Liao mentioned the integration, slated for the second quarter of 2025, will obtain Bitcoin’s “DeFi take-off second.”
Xverse said wallets want to be extra than simply storage options; and enable quick access to Bitcoin’s rising utility. Liao mentioned in a press release that the endgame is trustless DeFi on Bitcoin.
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“In in the present day’s atmosphere, there’s a temptation for pockets groups to say, ‘yeah, let’s simply focus on making it simpler for individuals to use Bitcoin as a retailer of worth,’” Liao mentioned.
“However the long-term way forward for Bitcoin additionally consists of utility, and that’s why layer 2 options should attain the public by way of the wallets they really use,” he added.
In the meantime, in a March 11 X house discussing Starknet’s plan, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said a correct Bitcoin L2 that may fulfill the wanted safety properties would “make crypto funds nice once more, and all these use circumstances can work.”
Starknet on Bitcoin and Ethereum https://t.co/tCyQDHY7Yr
— StarkWare 🐺🐱 (@StarkWareLtd) March 11, 2025
Buterin mentioned there’s a “lot of worth” in enabling the trustless movement of property between the Bitcoin and Ethereum ecosystems, comparable to simpler paths for decentralized trade.
“In case you return to the white paper, Bitcoin was meant to be a peer-to-peer digital money system, and clearly, layer 1 isn’t practically scalable sufficient for that,” Buterin mentioned.
“I believe we’ve additionally seen a few of the limits of the Lightning Community and that type of strategy.“
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