Last week, Denver was overrun with a bunch of token projects for a bunch of chains with a bunch of (claimed) users.
Yet one difference stood out amidst the sea of bad haircuts and zip-up hoodies: Bitcoin.
Indeed, Denver featured numerous Bitcoin events that were not around last year like an Ordinals cocktail nights, an Ordinals hacker house, and a full-day event, the Bitcoin Renaissance, showcasing different Bitcoin projects. Below, we’ll list some of the projects I’m paying attention to.
BabylonChain
Okay, to be honest, I’m not particularly enthralled with BabylonChain, but they do have a lot of developer talent. BabylonChain is a Proof-of-Stake network built on the Cosmos Tendermint SDK (a popular developer kit) that plans on using anyone’s Bitcoin holdings as the ‘stake’ for another network. Stakers would then receive yield from Dapps that build on top of BabylonChain. If you’re into risking your Bitcoin, this might be the project for you.
Citrea by Chainway
Citrea is a Zero Knowledge Rollup (ZKR) project for Bitcoin using BitVM (an open-source project from Robin Linus) as the foundation. ZKRs could be a huge boon for Bitcoin, as they would increase transaction throughput with very small trade-offs. (Show with Chainway’s Orkun Kılıç out shortly on The Mining Pod). ZKRs on Bitcoin is certainly something to watch.
Build on Bitcoin (BOB)
BOB might be one of the most hyped projects. It’s a mashup of Bitcoin, Ethereum’s EVM, merge-mining, and Zero Knowledge tech to allow for composability between Ethereum and Bitcoin. They have a testnet live now on the Ethereum Sepolia network.
Botanix
Botanix is a Bitcoin Layer 2 using an interesting multi-sig federation scheme, somewhat like a more complex and secure Liquid Network. They are focusing on attracting EVM developers to its project to increase applications, like DeFi for Bitcoin. We did a show with them back in December on The Mining Pod, which is a great place to start!
